


A Murmur, A Sigh 2

by thealphagate_archivist



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-24
Updated: 2006-03-24
Packaged: 2019-02-02 08:50:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12723414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thealphagate_archivist/pseuds/thealphagate_archivist
Summary: See part one





	A Murmur, A Sigh 2

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the archivists: this story was originally archived at [The Alpha Gate](https://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Alpha_Gate), a Stargate SG-1 archive, which began migration to the AO3 in 2017 when its hosting software, eFiction, was no longer receiving support. To preserve the archive, we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2017. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are this creator and it hasn't transferred to your AO3 account, please contact us using the e-mail address on [The Alpha Gate collection profile](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/thealphagate).

~ Wake me up inside   
Wake me up inside   
Call my name and save me from the dark   
Bid my blood to run before I come undone   
Save me from the nothing I've become... ~ 

An offering, a sacrifice...this horrid thing I hold in my/Darius's? hands, this thing of evil...but it has the power of life or death to some, especially to ONE whose name hovers near, so near, as evocative and mysterious as my own elusive identity...I see dark skin, gravely intelligent eyes, a fierce, proud spirit...but it doesn't fit, the notion that this hideous worm that I hold in my grasp is somehow connected to that image, to that other whose name dances so tantalizingly just beyond my reach...God, it hurts, my head frigging hurts SO MUCH, and I think maybe I'm ill, maybe I've been sick and I need help...No,I need to remember what I have to do, I promised Father this sacrifice, this oblation...

But it's wrong, this is all wrong...and that voice, the name it offers up, the name it hurls at me like a lance through my brain...It calls and calls, that familiar voice, until some other force suddenly intrudes and shuts off the sound in mid-grunt, ending the summoning, cutting me off from Daniel, from CONNECTING...It troubles me, the loss of that voice, and of the name it sent forth to pound and pound relentlessly at my skull, this skull that means I have a body, that I am a physical being, alive...that I am, I am...Jack.

JACK.

Jack...that was the name Daniel called, the name of the dark one, the one Father sent away to everlasting torment...I felt him go, felt the last, tenuous threads of that imperfect soul unloose themselves from their moorings with an agonized, infuriated cry that shrank and shrank away, spiralling down to little more than a murmur, a sigh, and then to nothing at all...

Nothing. I am nothing. Darius is here but he is nothing, too; he is a bit of alien metal, a tiny pellet in my head, he is the son of God but God is not here...His God is a killer of children, of innocent not-Charlie boys and damaged Colonels and inscrutable Jaffas--but surely this is blasphemy, to speak against one's own Father so, to doubt and question and to stand trembling before Him with this repulsive creature in hand, hating it, hating Him, yet needing His approval, needing this excruciating pain to STOP, needing Darius to make this sacrifice, to drive the dark one back again, back to perdition...

No, goddammit, NO! Not the dark one here, only me, only Jack, good old Jack, Daniel will vouch for me, he knows...He tried to wake me up, and there's blood now, blood on my hand from the knife I've taken up, the knife God offers me now to kill the worm, to kill my good friend Teal'c along with it...

~ Now that I know what I'm without   
You can't just leave me   
Breathe into me and make me real   
Bring me to life... ~ 

Help me, Daniel; please please please help me, make this stop, it hurts and I'm tired, so damned tired...but I have to do this, Darius is with me still and he serves the Father, he is his Father's son, he is smoke and mirrors and a bitter pill not swallowed but rammed into my brain with excruciating force, an unwelcome saviour, an unsolicited messiah...Out, I want him out!--he's not real, but I'm not real, either, am I? I'm the dark one, sent away, but Daniel wouldn't let me go, not Daniel...or Teal'c, or Carter. GOD, I KNOW those names, I want to breathe, I can't breathe, can't think, I want to LIVE!...

Help me, Daniel; help me breathe, help me live. I hurt you but you're still my friend--you'll help me, won't you help me...I won't let God kill you if you'll only help me, show me what it is JACK wants to do, NEEDS to do now...Yes. Jack. NOT Darius; no offerings on the ceremonial pyre from that craven, nonexistent son...Jack wants to come back now, Jack very badly wants to know what to do, and Daniel's eyes will tell him if only he can find that blue, blue gaze in all this darkness, in this cold, cold vacuum of infinite inner space...

~ Without a thought   
Without a voice   
Without a soul   
Don't let me die   
There must be something more   
Bring me to life... ~ 

Thought, voice, soul...here, all of it here, somewhere, and I am trying to understand, am wandering, searching...

I am the resurrection and the life, He said; but He lied, He's a lying son of a bitch, He kills kids and made me hurt Daniel, I made Daniel scream, oh God the screams...! I think I hurt Carter, too, (me, not Darius, all of it ME)...what did I do to Sam, I remember her eyes, so confused, so full of pain and despair as she struggled beneath my fists...

And now my head is exploding, my brain bursting out through this skull, this body that trembles with sick uncertainty concerning the identity of the consciousness inside it. There's a spirit fighting within, fighting to break free, to KNOW who the hell this is, who I am, as I stand here with the knife's keen blade slicing into the flesh of my palm, shedding crimson drops of blood onto the vile creature--it's called a symbiote, how do I know that?--struggling weakly in my fingers to evade the knife's deadly kiss...

Oh, Jesus, the symbiote!...This is TEAL'C'S life I hold in my hand now, Teal'c, my friend, my brother...Where have they taken you, what the living FUCK is going on here...?! Junior, it's Junior writhing and twisting in my grasp, and my blood falls on his sickly white flesh, my blood drips and sizzles a trail of memory and agony and bone-deep despair onto the marble floor as I lift my eyes--Jack O'Neill's eyes again, by God--into the colorless orbs of the bastard who killed Lah'jhan, into the gaze of the false, fucking god who wants to kill Teal'c...if he hasn't died already for lack of his symbiote.

And I can hear Daniel, Daniel whose voice called me back, Daniel who's lying on the floor behind me now with Stooge #2's massive foot planted in the back of his neck, cutting off his voice, his air, his strength...And I know Sam is here, I can hear her agitated breathing as Stooge #1 drags her up from the floor, holds her too hard, too tightly, and I know it hurts the bruises I gave her, I know she wants to lash out, to fight back but she's tired, too, so tired...

And it comes to me, finally something is clear, something makes sense...I know I have to fix this now, make this all come out right for my team, make this bastard smirking before me pay and pay and PAY for what he's done...I have to do this, I have to think, have to kill him-kill him-god-yes-KILL-the-fucker...and I know my name isn't Darius. But I also know--for now--that neither am I Jack...at least, not completely.

Just call me Judas, you motherfucker, I smile now deep inside, in a place that unwary faux-deities cannot probe with their wicked eyes; and as I curl the fingers of one hand protectively round Junior's weakly struggling form, my other hand clutches the sacrificial knife in blood-streaked fingers, my grip firming and tightening on the handle as I step forward to plant a traitor's kiss on the cold cheek of Darius's God.

"For you...Pops," I murmur silkily against his ear; and as his eyes go suddenly, impossibly wide with shocked comprehension, I ram the knife into his body with all the strength I have left in me.

"Die, you godless motherfucker!" I hiss into his agony-contorted face, leaning into him and twisting the knife, twisting and sawing and splitting him up the middle, opening up his rotting husk for all to see the lies suppurating within...The stench of his evil pours out on a noxious wave of gas and blood and steaming entrails, ropes of intestine surging eagerly forth as if eager to escape the fleshly confines containing them...Hot ichor pumps from his body to drench my hand, splashing down the front of my body as a scream unlike anything I've ever heard before erupts from his mouth in one long, continuous ululation of horrified denial.

"That was for Lah'jhan," I pant as he falls forward into my embrace, latching onto me with fierce, preternaturally strong fingers, caught up in his own, personal spasming death dance that has him digging his nails into my skin, has him vomiting up blood and curses and incoherent pleas for the Deity he's claimed to be to save him, to rain down eternal torment on my patricidal head...

"And this is for me," I murmur intimately against his neck, hurrying now because the stooges are about to snap out of their stunned, frozen shock and come for me, are mere seconds away from ripping me limb from limb. As Aliph claws at me, his gore-soaked body plastered against mine--as close as a lover, as near as my own heartbeat--I drop the knife and delve slippery fingers down into the pocket of his robe, searching out and finding the small rod he made me use on Daniel, the source of so much pain for my friend. In the space between one drowning, gurgling cry and the next, I bring the rod up, jam it against Aliph's left temple and activate it at its highest setting.

"I guess you're a god who can't even answer your own prayers," I mutter as Aliph goes completely rigid, the whites of his eyes searing and boiling and becoming nothing recognizable as human, not even recognizable as eyes anymore. I feel him die at the exact same moment my own, fading strength plays out completely; and as the both of us tumble gracelessly to the floor--Aliph's ruined body bleeding the last remnants of its evil all over my once nice robes--my limbs convulse and I feel the almost imperceptible trembling of Junior, still clutched like some bizarre, lucky talisman in my left hand.

Hang in there, you little bastard, I think almost fondly to the symbiote as Daniel's frantic cries drift vaguely into my consciousness. You've still got a Jaffa to save, not to mention the joy of all those fruitless fantasies of universal dominion coiled in your nasty little head. Don't you die, Junior; don't you fucking die.

And then there are hands on Aliph's body, hands on me, a veritable army of hands tugging and pulling us apart, reaching for my limp form; and I don't know if they're friend or foe, these hands--if they are the hands of mercy and assistance or the hands of brutal retaliation for having murdered yet another God-wannabe. I want to get up, want to do all I can to shield Daniel and Carter and Teal'c from the wrath my actions will bring down upon us; but right now there's nothing left in me, no more energy, no more rage to fuel even a weak attempt to rise up against these hands, these voices, so angry and so frantic...

But it's okay, I think dizzily to myself as my body becomes numb, unfeeling, just an object lying on the blood-soaked floor; I can rest now, now that I know who I am, now that I know what I've done. It's almost unbearably sweet, the burden of being Jack O'Neill once again; and as the light fades out around me, I'm dimly aware of my lips moving soundlessly and realize, with faint surprise, that even now--even after all of this--I am still able to utter a prayer of sorts:

'Save my friends; I took out another God-wannabe for You, it's the least You can do for ME.'

Maybe it won't make the top ten list of devotional favorites, I think as this world slides away from me; but it's the best I can do, dammit. And as I begin to hallucinate Daniel's hands gentle on my face, begin to hear his voice and imagine it's the voice of God, throwing me a gossamer-thin line to hang onto, to clutch at with my blood-slicked hands, a vast roaring washes the bizarre mental image away and leaves me lost again, falling.

* * *

Part XVII.

I can't believe this is happening. Somehow I thought Jack would be stronger, that the Darius consciousness or whatever the hell it is lurking inside his body would be unable to stand against the sheer gutsiness and determination buried deep in Jack O'Neill's soul. And with Teal'c's VERY immediate survival at stake, I suppose I allowed myself to believe that Jack would do anything--ANYTHING--to save our friend from the terrible death he's experiencing now at Aliph's hands.

But to my horror Jack doesn't seem to be anywhere in residence now behind those wild brown eyes that lift so beseechingly to Aliph's cold, colorless orbs. Darius's is the only essence I can sense within the subservient body of what used to be my best friend as that same lean, graceful body moves toward Aliph with Teal'c's symbiote held out before it in a desperate plea for approval, for mercy.

"No, Jack; NO, dammit!" I hear myself cry out, compelled to keep trying till my last breath to shake him out of this, to call him back from whatever dark, horrible place he's gone to before it's all too late. I feel almost overwhelmed by the horror of the situation, my body trembling as though in the grip of a high fever from the almost lethal mix of rage and fear and desperation churning inside my chest. God, Jack, not like this; don't let Aliph win, don't let him defeat you so easily!

"Don't do it, sir! Don't let him have Junior!" I hear Sam cry out, her voice muffled with strain and exertion as she struggles to break free of the hold one of the guards has on her. I'd love to rush to her aid, but I'm having my own mini-crisis as the other guard seems determined to grind his huge foot all the way through the back of my neck and into the floor he's got me pinned against so effortlessly. With the side of my face pressed painfully into the cold marble tiles, it's difficult to get a clear view of the action taking place mere feet away; but I grit my teeth against the agony the guard's foot is inflicting on my neck and manage to turn my head just enough to see Jack--no, Darius--coming to a position of abject servitude before his imposter god. He is murmuring something low and fervent and intense to Aliph, something about an oblation, about honoring and serving his true father; and I want to scream out the terrible frustration and fury building and building inside me.

"Jack! Damn you, Jack, wake up in there! Listen to me--listen to Sam! You can't do this, you can't let Aliph win! He's not God, and you know it! You're not his son, you're not Darius...Jesus, Jack, PLEASE! You have to remember who you are and WHAT you are! You know what needs to be done, it still isn't too late if you HURRY...!" With a strangled squawk my voice is cut off in mid-plea as the guard standing on my throat steps down even harder, practically crushing my larynx and coming close to severing my spinal cord, if the pain in my neck is any indication.

"Stop it, you're killing him, you bastard!" Sam yells, and as blackness dances around the edges of my vision, I can't decide if she's talking to the guard about me or to Darius about Teal'c. Doesn't really matter either way, I think fuzzily as I begin to choke and gasp wildly for air; if Jack's truly lost to us, then we're all lost. All doomed. God, it just CANNOT end this way!

And then it happens--the miracle I've been silently yearning for with no conscious awareness of doing so--the answer to my every, desperate prayer. As Darius makes a move to slice his knife deep into Teal'c's symbiote--severing forever any hope Teal'c might have of surviving this ordeal--a change as subtle and mercurial as the ripple caused by a single water droplet on the surface of the ocean passes through Jack's body, transforming that body's energy completely.

Between one pent breath and the release of it, Darius is gone; as Jack's figure steps up close, so close, to Aliph and whispers like a lover into the false god's ear, it is undeniably Jack's soul doing the whispering, Jack's hand that suddenly and savagely brings the knife up with an eternity's worth of rage and vengeance behind the movement, scissoring and thrusting with enough strength to split Aliph from crotch to nipple before the doomed charlatan can even summon the breath to scream.

"Die, you motherfucker; die!" I hear MY Jack growl in grim satisfaction; and as the guards holding Sam and I immobile freeze in disbelieving horror at the spectacle before them, both of us take advantage of their stunned stasis and surge up in a furious revolt of our own.

Silent curses fill my mind as I grapple with the incredibly heavy foot atop my neck, twisting and slithering my weak but determined body until I'm able to flip myself over far enough to grasp that hated foot between my hands and upset the guard's off-centered balance. With a startled grunt of dismay, the behemoth standing on my neck staggers heavily back, arms windmilling almost comically as he slams flat on his back onto the hard floor.

From the corner of my eye I can see Jack writhing in the floor beneath Aliph's gore-splattered body, his left hand stretched as far out to one side as he can reach, fingers still clutching the dying body of Teal'c'c symbiote as if in a desperate attempt to keep the creature safe and alive. As the painful sounds of Sam doing her best to dispatch her much-larger assailant sound in my ears, I drag myself away from the enraged, scrabbling form of my own guard with my heart pounding wildly in my chest. Still debilitated from my recent torture session with Darius (NOT Jack, I think fiercely to myself now), my body wavers uncertainly between the two options looming before me: should I go to Sam's defense, or grab Junior from Jack's hand and move as fast as I can to reimplant the nasty little bugger back in Teal'c's pouch, praying like mad the whole time that it's not too late already for the both of them?

One look, first at Sam's stubborn but sadly ineffective attempt to keep her guard's attention away from Jack, and then at Teal'c's limp, chained body, makes the decision grimly simple: with my own guard grappling madly at my heels, I pull myself on my belly across the blood-and-guts strewn floor and curl my right hand around Jack's left, my grip sliding briefly over his gore-streaked fingers before wrapping around the symbiote's unpleasantly smooth body still secure in his grasp.

At almost the same instant Sam's guard breaks free of her exhausted efforts to keep him away from our commander and drops heavily to his knees beside the two huddled bodies practically afloat on a sea of gore. The guard's huge, shaking hands begin yanking and tugging at Aliph's body, a high-pitched keening coming from his lips as he attempts to burrow down past his fallen deity's reeking corpse and get to the traitorous messiah temporarily shielded beneath it. Insane murder flashes in his eyes as he scrabbles for any bit of Jack's flesh he can reach, and I know we don't have much time.

"Junior...let me have Junior, Jack!" I pant weakly, my fingers tugging in opposition to Jack's stubborn hold. As the larval Goa'uld squeals weakly once from within the tangled web of our laced fingers, Jack turns his exhausted brown gaze on my face, a shadow of confused incomprehension darkening his unfocused stare.

"Jack..." I murmur softly, the insane tableau of blood and death and unspeakable violence that hangs so heavy and fetid in the air around us fading dimly into the background as recognition sparks suddenly and with startling ferocity in his eyes. Without conscious volition my fingers slide from Junior's blood-streaked form to stroke along Jack's hand, my touch pulling him back, anchoring both his mind and his spirit to this reality, to the unspoken link between us that has carried us through so many crises in the past.

"Daniel..." he echoes in mild surprise, the sound of my name gusting--broken and repentant--on a tired sigh from his lips. Daniel--just two simple syllables that nonetheless send a shiver of profound emotion through every molecule of my body, the blessedly familiar recognition in Jack's voice pulling a helpless groan of shattered relief from my chest as his eyes hold mine.

"We don't have much time, Jack," I plead calmly, my fingers unmindful of the sticky residue of Aliph's life's blood adhering to Jack's knuckles as I caress his hand in gentle persuasion. "I need to put Junior back--NOW. Teal'c's dying, Jack."

"Go...go," Jack nods, his gaze roaming hungrily over my face as though he's desperate to memorize every line, every angle, of my underlying bone structure; I feel his fingers twitch beneath mine, as though they long to follow the path his eyes have taken and to map my features through the intricacies of touch. Helpless to hide the depth of trembling emotion in my own frantic assessment of his drawn, blood-splattered face, I spare us one more second, one more heartbreakingly brief clasp and squeeze of joined fingers, before sliding the twitching symbiote from Jack's weakening grasp.

"Hurry," Jack rasps out, even as the guard who's been clawing his way up my back suddenly pulls himself to his knees in a sticky puddle of blood and lunges frantically at Aliph's and Jack's gruesomely entwined bodies. God, I think desperately, even as I force myself to pull away from the scene, from Jack and his pitifully vulnerable position beneath Aliph's corpse; God, they mean to rip Jack apart for killing their damned, fake god. And I'm helpless to stop them.

"Go, Daniel; go!" I hear Sam call out desperately, and I look up to see her crawling across the floor, both her face and her body tight with a mixture of pain and more determination than I've seen her display in a long time. Briefly her blue gaze flicks from me to something just beyond my line of sight, and taking her silent cue, I clutch Junior more securely to my chest and twist my body sideways long enough to follow the direction of Sam's pointed stare. Almost immediately my eye falls on the discarded torture rod Jack had slipped from Aliph's pocket and rammed against the false god's temple; he had apparently dropped it during Aliph's death spasms, and it had skittered across the blood-slicked floor to land several feet away from Jack's and Aliph's bodies.

Gotcha, I send back to Sam now with a grim nod, praying that she can get to the rod before one of the two goons at Jack's side notices. They'll still have the sheer physical strength needed to overpower her and simply take the device from her; but if Sam can conceal it from their immediate notice, we might be able to use it against them before they can react...or against one of them, at least, before the element of surprise wears off and goon #2 pulverizes us all into hamburger.

Trusting Sam to go to Jack's aid, I stagger upright and slip and slide across the entrail-smeared floor, Teal'c's symbiote flopping with dismaying lifelessness in my shaky grasp. Keeping my eyes fixed on Teal'c's equally lifeless form, I skid across the noxious remains of corrupted evil beneath my feet, fighting back a surge of acid nausea at the disgusting squish of spilled body fluids oozing up between my bare toes.

"Hold on, Teal'c! Just...hold on!" I hear myself gasp out with barely-contained desperation as I manage to reach his side without falling on my ass. Awkwardly juggling Junior's limp body in one hand, I reach with my other hand to feel for a pulse at Teal'c's neck. I can't find it, can't feel even the faintest thread of a heartbeat beneath my questing fingers; and with an inarticulate cry of rage and denial, I fumble wildly at the chains and the robes covering Teal'c's midsection until I finally bare enough of his abdomen to get a visual of his pouch.

Gritting my teeth against this intimate invasion of my Jaffa friend's body, I clutch Junior's seemingly dead body more securely in my hand and shove the creature as deeply into Teal'c's empty pouch as I can; the movement is met with surprising resistance, as though Teal'c's pouch is already sealing over and closing up in the aftermath of the loss of its lone inhabitant. I have to work my hand into my friend's body, my gaze sliding obliquely down at the task as if gazing directly at what I'm doing is just too much for my brain to process. I realize I'm breathing harshly through my mouth as I work, every respiration jerking roughly from my chest as I use my fingers to manipulate Junior's boneless length completely inside Teal'c's pouch.

"C'mon...C'MON, damn you both!!" I hear myself grit out, tears of strained effort springing hotly to my eyes. "Live, dammit, Teal'c! Come on, you know how pissed you're going to be if you let this tin-plated, Apophis wannabe take you out!"

I can hear myself sobbing out choked epithets as I withdraw my hand from Teal'c's pouch and try ineffectively to wrench the chains from his lax body; cursing my own frailty, I take Teal'c's lolling head between my blood-smeared hands and raise his ashen face to mine.

"Don't die, Teal'c...please, please..." I whisper, my fingers stroking desperately, uselessly, over his strong cheekbones and down across the fullness of his bottom lip. My thumb glides helplessly over the slight part between his top and bottom lip, all my senses focused on trying to detect even the faintest sign of air, of breath, ghosting from his mouth. But there's nothing. His eyes are closed, his bald head gleaming softly with a strangely dignified, almost unearthly beauty in the dim golden glow of the room's subdued lighting.

Teal'c has always been a master at the unutterable stillness of carefully restrained power, his body a sleekly carved and priceless granite sculpture made oddly fluid and graceful by the undeniable vitality of the spirit inhabiting it. And now, without that indefinable essence of soul to animate the body, Teal'c's empty shell slumps before me, a still-impressive but oddly unsatisfying piece of art, solid and so tragically empty.

"No..." I murmur, taking liberties I would never dare to take were he conscious and aware and dammit, alive; almost without volition my fingers continue to stroke his face, tracing the strong line of nose and jaw and the surprisingly smooth, dusky skin resting in such vivid contrast against my own pale touch. As a hard lump of grief rises in my throat, I find myself leaning in to press my forehead to his, my hands sliding up over the smooth dome of his head and around back to cradle the nape of his neck in my palms in an agony of silent regret. With my thumbs rubbing gently along either side of his neck, I blink back hopeless tears and murmur softly, "I'm sorry, Teal'c. I'm so sorry."

I want to stay here with him, torn between loyalty and friendship and the unutterably horrible feeling of knowing that Teal'c spent his last moments unattended, with no last words of comfort or benediction to ease his final breaths. The sensation of complete and total bereavement that lodgeds itself in the center of my chest seems to be cutting off my own breath, slowly but surely stealing life from my lungs as unidentifiable noises from behind me gradually resolve themselves into the grim sounds of mortal combat.

Realizing I can do nothing more for Teal'c now, I gently position his head so that his chin rests against his breast and turn my pain-wracked body with infinite weariness to face the dreaded scene of battle taking place mere feet away. It's highly doubtful that I'll be of any more use to my team in this particular arena than I was to Teal'c, but I can't let Sam and Jack take on Aliph's incensed guards all by themselves.

As my eyes take in the sight of one guard lying limp and deathly pale on the floor near Aliph's ruined corpse, the sound of Jack's low, continuous curses pulls me from numbed incomprehension to the almost surreal spectacle of both Sam and Jack riding the back of the second guard like demonic, gore-spattered imps from Hell.

With his legs wrapped securely around the guard's waist from behind, Jack uses every ounce of strength he has left in his body, channeling the last dregs of his energy into his fists as he whales away at the back of the guard's head; at the same time, Sam makes use of our c.o.'s diversion to literally climb up the right side of the raging behemoth flailing at them both, her nimble hands manipulating the device she's holding to a position as close to the guard's neck as she can get it.

"Goddammit, Carter, hurry up!" Jack growls, his voice frayed with the ire of exhausted desperation; I know he's rapidly reaching the limits of his endurance, and as the guard slams one meaty arm around behind him and almost succeeds in hurling Sam from her tenacious grip on his shoulder, I force my stiff legs into motion, charging clumsily to the rescue and completely forgetting the slimy soup of Aliph gore lying in wait underfoot.

With a dismayed cry I suddenly find my already shaky legs sliding out from under me, sending me flat on my ass with a tailbone-jarring thump that has me biting down hard on my tongue with the exquisite agony of it. Completely out of control, my stunned body slides and careens across the floor and slams into the guard's ankles with all the force of a small tornado, impacting his body at exactly the same moment Sam finally manages to press the torture rod against his neck.

With a truly hideous scream of enraged agony, the guard stiffens as if caught in the throes of a grand mal seizure, his body going rigid even as he's knocked off his feet by my own graceless entrance onto the scene. Everything seems to take place in slow motion, the four of us merging into a phantasmogoric, multi-headed creature from a Daliesque nightmare as Aliph's final bastion of evil crumbles.

Bathed in the crimson-and-black hues of blood and ichor, all of us--Sam, Jack, the guard, and I--kiss the fouled floor with earth-shattering force, limbs impacting the tiles beneath us with uncontrollable violence. As someone's elbow connects viciously with my left cheekbone, I'm dimly aware that gut-wrenching cries of pain are erupting simultaneously from our four separate mouths.

I want to move, want to drag myself away from this traffic-stopping disaster of a collision, but I seem to be buried under a solid wall of crushing flesh, my panicked body bucking uselessly against the weight pressing me down into the nasty slime on the floor. Sam obviously gave the guard a heaping dose of hurt, as he lies jittering and jerking and convulsing helplessly in the midst of us, his floor-thumping exertions knocking the rest of us to and fro like flotsam and jetsam on some noxious sea.

"Teal'c!" Jack gasps raggedly from somewhere under the guard's threshing legs; briefly I catch a glimpse of one red-rimmed, wild brown eye commanding my attention, and at the breathless question that eye directs my way, I try to suck nonexistent air into my compressed lungs to wheeze out the hopeless verdict.

"Gone," I say, the word hanging over us like the black sword of death, of eternal damnation. "Too late--" I gasp out as the guard gives one last, monumental heave of quivering muscles and goes lax, his dead weight pinning Sam and me to the floor in exhausted surrender.

"Like hell it is!" Jack growls from underneath the guard's tree-trunk legs; even though his face is positively gray beneath the savage mask of gore congealing on his skin, he somehow manages to grimly heave one of the guard's legs away from his body and then squirms and wiggles tenaciously till he's able to pull himself free of the other leg.

"Where's that rod?" he barks at Sam, his blood-stiffened hair sticking straight up from his head in matted spikes as he staggers to his knees. "Dammit, we don't have TIME for this shit! Carter, where the fuck IS it?!"

"I think I'm...lying on it, sir," Sam gasps out, her blue eyes widening with both pain and recognition as she scrabbles weakly beneath her. "I can't...get to it, this oaf has my arm wedged...under my stomach..."

"Here, maybe I can reach it," I grit out, digging my fingers into the seam of one of the floor tiles and clawing my own glacially slow way out from under the guard's right arm. Stretching gingerly toward Sam's prone body, I manage to slip my right hand under her torso and fumble blindly for the missing device.

The first, hesitant blush of some huge insight regarding Jack's urgency is dawning faintly at the edges of my wavering mind, and as Sam chokes back a grunt of pain and directs me to slide my fingers a little more to the right, I realize where Jack's thoughts are leading concerning the retrieval of the device. Even though it's so obviously hopeless to even consider the possibility that Teal'c might yet be saved, I suddenly find my heart pounding wildly in my chest with the desperate need to believe, to trust that if Jack could return from Hell, then surely he can bring Teal'c back, too. And as my fingers close around the hard outline of the torture rod, I can't help the short bark of triumph that erupts from my throat.

"Got it!" I call out, and before I've even managed to withdraw the device completely from beneath Sam's pinned body, Jack is scrambling like a deranged monkey over both the guard's limp form and my own, pain-drenched body. With a low grunt he snatches the device from my trembling hand and rolls off me onto his hands and knees, his body shaking uncontrollably with exhausted desperation as he struggles to find his feet and stay upright on the blood-slick tiles.

"Oh, God, can he do it?" Sam exclaims in a low, hoarse voice trembling with emotional strain and fatigue. "Daniel, are you sure Teal'c is..."

"I couldn't find a pulse...no hearbeat, no breathing," I reply wearily, my gaze meeting hers for one long, troubled intake of putrid air. "But the rod...the electrical current it carries..."

"Instant defibrillator?" Sam finishes half-hopefully, half-doubtfully. I can see the pulsebeat at her neck begin to triphammer with excitement, with the same, overwhelming need my own heart feels right now to pull one more miracle from this hellish mission, from this seemingly doomed day.

"He'll need our help," I say grimly, and with a bare nod to each other Sam and I work together to fight our way clear of the guard's barely-breathing bulk. Please don't let it be too late, please prove me wrong, let me be wrong!--

I hear the words over and over in my head now, repeating themselves like an insane litany; and as I stumble to my feet and follow unsteadily in Sam's wake to the pillar where Teal'c's body is chained, I find myself fighting the urge to laugh hysterically at the notion that Jack O'Neill might yet end this day with not one, but two amazing resurrections under his belt--his own and now Teal'c's.

Jack's will be done, I think with half-crazed disregard for the heretical nature of the sentiment; if it means both of my friends will go home with Sam and me, alive and breathing at the close of this horrible day, then I'll be happy to spout blasphemies all the way back through the gate.

C'mon, Teal'c, I urge silently now as I move with Sam to Jack's side, the three of us staring somberly at our team mate's still form; come back to us, straight from the vaunted Hall of Warriors or whatever the hell it is...We need you, Teal'c; and there's one very sore, exhausted, pissed-off dark angel here who just won't take no for an answer.

"Stand back," the dark one himself rasps now, his fatigue-shadowed eyes glittering suddenly with immutable resolve. "Stay clear, and pray like hell that this works." And as Jack steps up to press the torture device to the muscled wall of Teal'c's chest, directly over his heart, I feel my own heart freeze within me, its jerky beats seemingly jangling to a discordant, faltering halt as I close my eyes against the terrible fear that this will all be for nothing.

* * *

Part XVIII.

That s.o.b. will NOT take one of mine; he didn't get me, hard as he tried, and he sure as hell isn't going to add Teal'c to his list of victims. I don't care how hopeless it looks--we are NOT giving up on the Big Guy.

"Get back!" I repeat harshly to the others as I press Aliph's torture stick against the unmoving wall of Teal'c's chest. God, I hate this, I think grimly to myself as I try to position the device directly over Teal'c's silent heart; even knowing I can't possibly do any further damage to my friend, the very idea of zapping him with this thing gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"C'mon, T; don't make me do this more than once," I hear myself mutter distractedly as my blood-encrusted fingers fumble for the hidden activation control on the device. I can feel both Carter and Daniel practically breathing down my neck, and in my current exhausted, jagged-nerves state, it's all I can do to stop myself from spinning around and warning them off with a snarled curse.

But the silent weight of their intense concern for Teal'c pulls me back from the raw edge of emotions frayed nearly to the breaking point; Daniel's tentative, featherlight brushing of fingers across my back keeps me from erupting now into yet another display of traumatized fury at how completely gone-to-shit this mission has turned out to be. Teal'c...oh, God, T, don't do this to me...

As my thumb hovers over the device's trigger, my pulse pounding weak and rapid through my veins, I find myself briefly lifting my other hand to cup Teal'c's jaw, tilting his head back and up so that the strongly chiseled planes of his face are revealed to my grieving eyes.

"Come back to us, Big Guy," I murmur before gently resettling his chin against his chest and taking a firmer grip on Aliph's little torture toy. "We need to get the hell out of here, and we're damned sure not leaving you behind; and in a unanimous vote, your fellow team members have decided that we would much prefer carrying you out of here still breathing. So, okay; here we go."

And before I can talk myself into backing out, I activate the device and press it with grim determination to Teal'c's bare skin. His body jerks convulsively--once, twice, three times--as I grit my teeth and force myself to keep putting steady pressure against my friend's chest with the hated device.

After the third mini-seizure jolts Teal'c's body with no discernible change in his condition, I can't take it anymore and deactivate the rod, lowering it to my side with a trembling hand.

"God...we ARE too late," Sam murmurs from behind me, her voice thick with an exhausted grief whose hopeless finality starts up a sympathetic, relentless pounding deep inside my head.

"He's gone, then," Daniel's voice sounds in a defeated tone that is nonetheless as much question as statement; slowly I turn to look into his eyes and find my soul pierced through by the unguarded expression of dark misery in his somber return gaze. Behind the misery I see the reflection of my own stunned disbelief, and the intensity of that mirrored sentiment tightens my chest with an anger that's almost beyond bearing.

"We didn't try everything; there's still Junior," I hear myself grit out stubbornly, and at the dubious look on Daniel's face, I lift the torture rod and gesture angrily with it in the direction of Teal'c's abdomen.

"Junior's the one who serves as Teal'c's immune system, right?" I ask, and both Daniel and Sam nod cautious agreement.

"So you're thinking if you can jumpstart Junior again, maybe he'll be able to revive Teal'c somehow," Daniel murmurs, and I give him a curt nod before turning back to T's limp body.

"Why not; we did the same kind of thing once before in Janet's medical lab," I mutter, then jerk my head toward my team mates. "I might need some help with this," I warn tersely; and almost before the words are out of my mouth, both Carter and Daniel are moving up on either side of me, silently awaiting my instructions.

"One of you needs to reach in and pull Junior out of Teal'c's pouch, at least far enough for me to zap the little bastard," I order, and Sam and Daniel cast brief, questioning glances at one another, silently deliberating with each other and then agreeing on which one of them will do the honors.

Without a word Daniel reaches out to brush hesitant fingers against Teal'c's abdomen; with the smallest grimace of misgiving playing about his lips, his hand slides into the narrow cavity in Teal'c's stomach and begins to fish around for the symbiote. And a new party game is launched, I think nonsensically to myself as a brief, ludicrous flash of an imaginary tv commercial touting the all-new "Find the symbiote!" game flickers in my head. Obviously some of my marbles are still missing, I think with distracted exasperation as Daniel bites down on his lower lip and nods his head at me.

"Get ready, Jack," he mutters tensely after another, nervewracking moment of careful grappling inside Teal'c's body; and I nod an almost imperceptible response as my fingers tighten on the device in my hand in strained preparation. Almost as soon as Junior's ugly little head appears, clutched rather gingerly between Daniel's thumb and forefinger, I'm toggling the tiny nub of the rod's activation control and steadying my hand as a subliminal hum of energy starts building up inside the device.

"Pull him out a little further," I order curtly, and Daniel complies in taut silence. Carter has moved to stand alongside Teal'c's slumped form and has taken his left hand between her palms, gently rubbing his dark skin as if trying to coax life and mobility back into his unresponsive digits.

"Just do it, Jack...please," Daniel adjures into the sudden silence that's fallen over us, and I curse inwardly to myself as I realize he's right; I'm reacting to this whole situation with uncharacteristic hesitance, and Teal'c's death will be the penalty we'll all pay for my indecision if I don't get my ass in gear.

"Watch out--part of the charge might transfer itself to you from Junior," I warn Daniel, and he merely nods roughly, his eyes dark and intense on mine as we share one final look of exhausted desperation. In the next instant I'm pressing the device against the symbiote's sickly white flesh, fighting the reflexive backward jerking of the hand holding the rod as Junior arches wildly in Daniel's grasp and gives off the most godawful screech I've ever heard the little monster emit.

"Again!" Daniel gasps, his face paling a bit as what must have been a decidedly unpleasant electrical shock ripples its effects across his face. I give him a second to reposition his grip on the weakly writhing larva hanging halfway out of Teal'c's pouch, then I zap the little sucker again, my jaw clenched tight against the shrill shrieks that emerge from Junior's madly working maw.

"Shit!" Daniel exclaims, lifting his left hand and using it to brace his right wrist as painful spasms of current radiate from the symbiote's body into Daniel's fingers, then up along his right arm. "I--I think it's working," he adds breathlessly, his attention fully focused on the very pissed-off Goa'uld larva struggling more and more strongly in his grasp.

"Hurry--stuff him back inside; let's see if he can help Teal'c," I order, and Daniel nods and wrestles Junior back into his customary environment.

"God, please..." Sam groans at Teal'c's side, and my eyes fall to the sight of her fingers curled tightly now around Teal'c's wrist, her nails digging into his dusky flesh with an intensity equal to the desperation in her blue eyes. "Come on, Teal'c, time to get your butt back here where you belong; you don't expect us to let Junior take one of US as his next home, now, do you?" she adds with rather macabre wit.

"I've had more than my fair share of THAT sort of thing for one mission, thank you," I retort with an acerbic grunt; but as Sam's eyes widen and she murmurs a flustered, 'Sorry, sir,' in my direction, I merely flap an indifferent hand her way and reach to circle Daniel's right wrist with my fingers, my other hand lifting to capture his right hand and hold his arm still.

"All right?" I question softly, briskly sliding the fingers I have clasped around his wrist up and down his arm; minute tremors of electricity still twitch at the nerves beneath his skin, and an expression of mingled relief and discomfort briefly twists his face as I massage the last, tingling remnants of the device's charge from his mildly contracting muscles.

"I'm fine, Jack," he murmurs, for maybe the millionth time since the very first moment I ever laid eyes on him; pushing away the knowledge that his "fines" usually mean just the opposite, I merely nod silently and almost regretfully release my hold on his arm. A strangely powerful sensation of bereavement washes through me as he gently disengages his hand from mine, the loss of contact leaving my fingers slightly curled and twitching helplessly, as if groping to re-establish a physical connection with him, to reassure myself that he really will be okay, despite all he's gone through in this place. I did things to him, I think dimly now, a wave of dark horror surging up from somewhere deep inside my mind; I hurt him, hurt Carter, and now Teal'c...

Oh, God, how could I forget Teal'c, even for a second! I curse to myself as my attention is wrenched almost painfully from the withdrawal of Daniel's touch to the still-motionless form of our team mate slumped against those damned chains.

"Let's get him down from there," I grit out, and with brief nods Daniel and Carter begin fumbling at the chains, looking for some way to unfasten them.

"There's a lock here, we'll need the key," Sam murmurs after a few seconds of urgent fumbling at the chain-wrapped stone column at Teal'c's back. "Maybe the guards--"

"I'm on it," Daniel gusts out and scrambles gingerly across the blood-smeared floor to drop to his knees beside the fallen guards. As he begins rifling through their robes in search of a key to the chains' padlock, I turn my attention back to Teal'c, taking his head between my hands and briskly rubbing my thumbs along either side of his face.

"C'mon, T, give us a sign here," I mutter fretfully, giving his head a little shake and scowling in grieved frustration as my helpless ministrations are met with absolutely no response. "Dammit, Teal'c, I am ORDERING you to live!" I exclaim in my pissiest, most deeply aggravated voice; and as Daniel suddenly gives a sharp exhalation of triumph at one guard's side and waves a metal object in the air above his head, I'm almost certain I feel the smallest tremor of...something...from somewhere deep in Teal'c's limp form.

"Get over here with that!" I order sharply, and Daniel almost falls on his ass as he hurries to comply, his bare feet sliding and skidding in the gore drying on the ornately tiled floor.

"Talk to him, Carter," I address my 2IC as I continue stroking Teal'c's face and chest, rubbing almost hard enough to hurt him as I attempt to pull him back from death, trying to reawaken him to his body, to life. As Carter presses her lips to the shell of Teal'c's ear, murmuring heartfelt pleas for him to come back, to be here with us, Daniel arrives with the key and scurries around behind the pillar to fit it into the lock binding all the chains together around Teal'c's body.

"Hang on, almost got it, just...one...second..." I can hear Daniel muttering feverishly as his shaky fingers stab at the stubborn lock; Junior is writhing and chittering and making a decidedly unhappy commotion from inside Teal'c's pouch, and I can only hope that that means he's trying his best to save his cozy home by also saving the soul who's shared it with him all these years.

As long as Junior's staying in the pouch trying to heal Teal'c, rather than blindly seeking to expel himself and go in search of a new host, then that definitely means he doesn't think Teal'c is a completely lost cause yet...doesn't it? I ask myself frantically as Daniel gives a guttural snarl of satisfaction and the heavy chains around Teal'c's chest suddenly loosen and go slack.

"Have you got him, Jack?" Daniel calls as I wrap both arms securely around Teal'c's body, cradling him against me as he falls forward, dragging heavy lengths of chain with him.

"Got him," I huff, shooting Carter a silent look of gratitude as she hurries to help me lower Teal'c to the floor. I'm marginally aware of both Carter and Daniel maneuvering the chains carefully from around the Jaffa's prone figure, but the main focus of my attention lies with Teal'c himself; his abdomen ripples with the internal force of Junior's agitated gyrations, and as my fingers fumble at his neck for any sign of a pulse, I imagine I feel the slightest rise of his chest beneath my palm as I slide my other hand to rest over his heart.

"Go, Junior, go!" I exhort the little critter inside my friend's abdomen, my eyes shifting from Teal'c's slack features to his unmoving chest and then to the cold, silent ridge of artery lying quiescent beneath my questing fingers. "Goddammit, T, work with us just a LITTLE bit, here!"

"Maybe you should zap him again," Daniel offers uncertainly from Teal'c's right side; his blue eyes hold mine, their expression grim, as he clarifies: "Zap Teal'c, I mean...maybe just a small jolt..."

"What if it interferes with whatever it is Junior's doing?" I fret, and Sam gives both Daniel and me a worried frown, her brow furrowing in thought.

"The symbiote's still very weak itself, sir," she murmurs consideringly, her pensive gaze dropping to Teal'c's unresponsive form. "Maybe if we try it just one more time on Teal'c, set to lowest level..."

"Where'd I put the damned thing?" I growl out, and Daniel gestures wordlessly to a spot slightly behind me.

"Do you want me to--?" he begins as I fumble at my heels and close reluctant fingers around the torture rod. I shoot him a brief, dark look of chagrined gratitude even as I shake my head in brusque refusal.

"I'm the commander; I'll do it," I rasp and gesture for Sam and Daniel to take their hands away from Teal'c's body. As soon as they're clear, I press the rod against Teal'c's chest and depress the tiny trigger, not flinching this time as current travels from it into my friend's body. Teal'c arches gently, his back bowing up off the floor beneath him in a strangely graceful arc as one arm twitches and jerks as if he's been briefly startled by something unexpected intruding into his awareness. And awareness is all we can pray for; feverishly the three of us scrutinize his body for ANY sign of life as Junior lets it be known in no uncertain terms that he did NOT appreciate our latest resuscitation attempt.

"Check his pulse, Carter," I sigh as the last, faint tremors of current die away and Teal'c's barely twitching arm goes lax at his side. Dammit to fucking hell, it's too late, we've lost him, he's gone, really gone...The hopeless mantra repeats itself over and over in my mind as my dulled eyes stare blindly at Carter's pale fingers pressed against Teal'c's neck, probing desperately for even the faintest pulse, the smallest thread of life beneath the Jaffa's skin.

"One of the guards is dead; the other will revive soon. And once everyone knows what we did to Aliph..." Daniel mumbles wearily now, his fingers plucking absently, obsessively, at the skin of Teal'c's arm. "If we stay here much longer, Jack..."

"You mean what I did to Aliph," I growl back. "And I don't give a damn who comes in on us, Daniel," I add, my eyes glittering angrily into his as we face off across Teal'c's body. "None of us is exactly operating on full thrusters right now, and carrying Teal'c's...body...along with us is probably going to drain us of whatever physical resources we have left. We wouldn't get fifty feet down the corridor outside before we got caught. So to hell with it; we stay right here, with Teal'c. We sit here, and we wait."

"I didn't mean it like that, Jack," Daniel mutters resignedly, too broken and exhausted to even take offense at my infuriated tone. "You know I'd never leave Teal'c...never leave ANY of you...behind--dead or alive. No more than you would."

His blue eyes are gentle on mine, his pupils enlarging with the volume of his own compassionate empathy; and as he reaches a hand to rest it over my own hand atop Teal'c's unmoving chest, I feel sudden, unexpected tears flood hotly into my eyes.

"Sorry, Daniel," I mutter dejectedly, feeling every damned last whisper of the exhaustion that's overtaking my body, threatening to pull me down so low I might never rise again. "I'm just...tired. So damned tired."

"I only meant that maybe--since we're staying here--we might move behind these pillars and hold them off for a few more minutes when they come," Daniel is explaining patiently, his face pinched and colorless with silent pain.

"Why delay the inevitable?" I begin tonelessly, my body empty of any last, hidden reserves of strength, of determination; suddenly nothing fucking matters, I don't want to deal with this, don't want to remember all I did and said and how weak I was, how easily I was overtaken by Aliph's artificially created messiah...This isn't like you, O'Neill; this ISN'T you, giving up like this, a distant voice hectors me from somewhere inside my mind. But I'm tired, too goddamned tired to pay it any attention.

"I'll try to block them; you take the rod, use it as long as you can to defend yourself and Carter," I start wearily, shoving the hateful device in my left hand in Daniel's direction. Mutely he shakes his head in denial, making no move to accept the rod; and before I can dredge up a few choice swear words to motivate him, Sam suddenly makes frantic shushing noises to both Daniel and me and raises impossibly huge blue eyes to my face.

"I think he's got a pulse!" she hisses aloud, her fingers pressing into the side of Teal'c's neck. "Shut up, you guys, let me concentrate!"

Instantly Daniel and I clam up, our gazes locking briefly before settling on Carter's frantic ministrations to Teal'c. She's moved her fingers from one carotid artery to the other, her eyes closing as she channels all her attention, all her focus, into her sensitive fingertips.

"I feel something, I know it," she mutters more to herself than to us, her mouth twisting to one side as she drops her free hand to Teal'c's forehead and rubs small, distracted circles around the tattoo embedded there. "If he'd only take a breath, remember how to breathe..."

"Maybe he just needs reminding," I say, already moving to tilt the Big Guy's head back, my fingers pinching his nostrils shut as I lean over and lower my mouth to his. As Daniel begins to count automatically above me, I blow several evenly-spaced breaths into Teal'c's mouth and stop when I feel Daniel's hand on my shoulder.

"Wait..." he murmurs, and even without looking I'm conscious of his eyes riveting themselves to Teal'c's chest, searching for any evidence of spontaneous respiration. "Nothing; go again," he mutters worriedly after a heart beat, and I repeat the process of blowing precious oxygen into Teal'c's flaccid lungs, breathing into him all my hopes and prayers at the same time my breath fills his body.

Again I feel Daniel's constraining touch on my shoulder, and again I pause in my efforts, tiny black spots of exhaustion dancing behind my closed eyes. I can't look anymore into Teal'c's passive face, can't make myself lift my eyes and see the defeated sorrow that I know I'll see darkly in Daniel's resigned gaze.

"Oh, my God...he just took a breath," I hear instead, unbelievably, and it takes me a long, stunned instant to process and identify the peculiar note I just heard in Daniel's voice. Shaky, tremulous, dumbfounded--all of these and more resonate in Daniel's quietly frantic tone as he repeats louder, stronger: "He breathed; he's breathing!"

"Thank God; oh, thank God!" I hear Carter gasp out on a choked half-laugh, half-sob, and I open my eyes to find myself staring down into Teal'c's unconscious face, absorbing with something close to stupid wonder the almost imperceptible flaring of his nostrils as he draws in air all on his own. My gaze travels down to his chest, to the very slight rise and fall of his rib cage as he breathes; and both Daniel and I find ourselves competing in the race to plaster our hands over his heart, searching out the elusive, miraculous rythym of its life-sustaining throb beneath our palms.

"YES, dammit! YES!!" I hiss fiercely, my eyes refilling with hot tears; I'm sure the savage grin on my face isn't quite sane, but Daniel's wild-eyed stare of stunned jubilation is every bit a match for the expression on my face.

"C'mon, Teal'c; come on, you great big hunk of Jaffa love; open those bedroom eyes, give us another thrill," I hear myself muttering nonsensically as Junior squirms and complains in muffled tones from within Teal'c's pouch. "Wakey, wakey, Big Guy; come on, we've got company coming, and it would be very rude to sleep through their visit."

My hands are trembling as I cup Teal'c's face between my palms, my thumbs caressing the line of his jaw in mute affection and gratitude; his breathing is audible now, and a tiny wisp of something that sounds almost like a groan climbs halfway up his throat and vanishes there. None of us seem able to keep our hands off him; even as I caress the strong ridge of his jaw, murmuring to him that he needs to wake up, Sam has both hands on the smooth dome of his skull, massaging the crown of his bald head with gentle, loving fingers; and Daniel seems almost oblivious to the fact that he has both hands spread flat atop Teal'c's chest, his eyes closed in an expression of silent concentration as he revels in the comforting vibration of Teal'c's incredibly strong-willed heart beating beneath his slender fingers.

"Well, team," I hear myself begin, my voice oddly rough with emotion; I can hear the exhaustion in every syllable that comes from my lips, but behind that I can hear something more, something stronger and better and blessedly familiar. I hear the return of hope to my voice, to my soul; I hear the sound of subdued but inexorable determination infiltrating every battered cell of my being, and even though physically I feel like I'm ready to drop, the sense of victory and jubilation rising inside my spirit is working hard to offset the exhaustion in my body.

"Well, team," I repeat with what must be a completely goofy-assed grin on my face; "It looks like the dynamics of this whole situation have suddenly changed...and I for one seem to have lost the desire to just sit here and wait to be mangled at the hands of a bunch of misguided religious zealots."

"Ditto," Sam grins, wrinkling her nose at me as relieved tears shine in her eyes. "I would very much like to get Teal'c out of here and back to the SGC so Janet can take a look at him; any brilliant suggestions for how we're going to accomplish that?"

"Teal'c's not the only one in need of the Doc's services," I remind her grimly, taking in the bruises on her face and the stiff, pain-filled way Daniel is holding his body as he kneels at Teal'c's side across from me. "And I don't KNOW yet how the hell we're going to get out of this...but we are. I promise you that we ARE going home...alive. ALL of us."

"Indeed, O'Neill."

The words are so softly spoken that for a frozen space of several stunned seconds all I can do is gape at Sam and Daniel, studying their matching, dropped-jawed expressions as though suspicious that they've somehow managed to mimic Teal'c's unmistakable rumble and are playing some sort of sick joke on me. But then it hits me, the overwhelming realization that Teal'c is awake and TALKING to me, dammit...and I can't hold back the small shout of triumphant elation that escapes me as I direct my gaze to his beautiful, wide-opened eyes.

"T!" I crow, my face almost splitting in two with the width of my smile; as my eyes devour his somewhat confused and mildly curious expression, I can't stop myself from leaning down to press a huge, smacking kiss to his forehead.

"You son of a bitch!" I chortle deliriously as my hands frame his face and stroke lightly along the ridges of his cheek bones. "You scared the living shit out of us, Big Guy; about time you decided to come back."

"I offer my apologies, O'Neill," Teal'c rumbles quietly, his dark eyes gleaming up at me with a weary blend of both regret and humor. "It was I who meant to save you, not the other way around."

"You save me, I save you...who's counting? I thought we stopped keeping score long ago," I quip gently. "Next time maybe it'll be Daniel's turn to save the universe...or Carter's. But for now, my friends, we just need to get the hell out of here."

"I second that, sir," Carter murmurs from her kneeling position at Teal'c's head; and as Teal'c makes a weak effort to tilt his neck back to look at her, she leans over him obligingly to make it easier for him to see her face. Her expression is damned near radiant with overjoyed relief, and something warm and strangely intimate seems to pass briefly between the two of them as Carter loses herself in T's amazingly tranquil gaze.

"Good to have you with us, Teal'c," Daniel speaks up quietly, and Teal'c shifts his attention from Carter to lift a weak hand in Daniel's direction. Daniel reaches to touch his fingers to Teal'c's, their digits gently entwining in a brief, subtle clasp of silent communion; for the smallest second I witness Daniel's thumb tracing a careful trail of comfort and reassurance against Teal'c's hand, and then the stoic Jaffa respectfully withdraws from the contact, his suddenly ashen complexion revealing how very weak he still is.

"Oops; I think Sleeping Beauty over there is trying to awake from his nap," Sam warns, and both Daniel and I look over to see the unconscious guard twitching and moaning fitfully as he tries to claw his way up from being half-electrocuted minutes ago. "Suggest we try to clear out of here QUICKLY, sir?" Sam adds, and I give her a wicked grin.

"And that's why you're earning the big bucks, Carter," I reply, feeling a strange rush of euphoria in the midst of my exhaustion and frayed nerves. "Gentlemen, methinks the lady doth make a hellava lot of sense; let's pack it in and MOVE, people."

"I am weak still, O'Neill," Teal'c begins with a troubled frown, his voice barely audible as he strains to eject the words from his recently revived body. "I will only hold all of you back; you should return without me, send another team for retrieval..."

 

"NO ONE GETS LEFT BEHIND," I announce grimly, lowering my face so close to Teal'c's that my breath puffs warmly against his cheek. "You know the drill, Big Guy. So shut up and get with the program. Who's in charge here, anyway?"

"You are, O'Neill," Teal'c manages, his voice gravelly with something that sounds suspiciously like affectionate relief. "It is...good...to see that you are...yourself...again, my brother."

"I owe you, Teal'c; I owe ALL of you, more than I can ever repay," I answer tersely, my tone roughening with the force of my own emotions. "But that's for another time; right now we're just going to do our damndest to get out of here all in one piece and make it back to the stargate. Is everybody down with that?"

"'Down with that', Jack?" Daniel echoes bemusedly, one eyebrow raised in disbelief; but there's a wonderful, familiar glow of life and energy returning to his exhausted eyes as he looks at me, and I can't help grinning at him like an idiot.

"Hey, I'm not just some stodgy old Colonel," I defend myself, and a muffled snort of laughter escapes Sam's lips as she begins to help me prep Teal'c for moving him. "I mean, I heard Cassie talking on the phone to one of her friends once; I'm not completely in the dark concerning today's radical, hip teen lingo."

"Just don't EVER try to talk like that to ANY self-respecting teenager, Jack," Daniel suggests with a ghost of a smile, and Teal'c's subdued voice chimes in.

"Do not speak in such a manner to ANYONE, O'Neill; not if you wish to retain at least a modicum of dignity and respectability."

"Everyone's a critic," I huff woundedly, hiding the huge smile that's rising and rising inside me like blinding sunlight after months of grim darkness. "But we'll discuss this insubordination in the ranks later; right now we need to MOVE."

As Sam and Daniel slide careful arms around Teal'c's body to help him ease to a sitting position, I grab the torture rod and make my way over to the guard who's struggling to pull his hulking body upright in the middle of the entrail-strewn floor.

"Ah,ah! None of that, now," I chide him and tap the activated rod against his shoulder. With an anguished scream the guard crashes back against the floor, his limbs threshing helplessly until his eyes roll up in his head and he's unconscious again. I suppose I should feel SOMETHING concerning my treatment of him, but all I can do is recall how it felt when this same asshole broke my arm outside the cell block while my friends listened helplessly; he'd seemed to enjoy the activity immensely, and now--even though I don't feel any enjoyment myself for hurting him back--neither do I feel regret.

"It's not going to be easy, slipping out of here," I call back over my shoulder to my team as I head for the room's single, closed door. "Especially looking like this," I add under my breath as I look down at the chunks of gore and thick, cloying streamers of Aliph's blood liberally splattering my robes. "So we'll have to move as fast as we can--" I begin but get no further.

The closed door is suddenly closed no longer; even as my fingers reach for the knob, my mind intent on testing to see if it's locked, the knob turns and the door flies open in swift silence, slamming against the wall behind it with a dull but powerful thud that sets my teeth on edge. And as my eyes take in the veritable mob of infuriated natives crowding--fully armed and reeking of vengeance--in through the open portal, I can't help thinking that I'm getting really, really tired of this line of work.

* * *

Part XIX.

I'm no mind reader, but I know exactly what Jack is thinking right now; as his gaze swivels from the mob at the door to slide frustratedly first over Sam's worried expression, then Teal'c's ashen features, and lastly across my own agitated face, I can read quite clearly every word blazing back at me from his pissed-off brown eyes:

Well, this day just keeps getting better and better.

The thought comes so clearly to me, every nuance of every word so distinct and vibrant with Jack's unmistakable spirit, that a choked snort of wry humor fights its way past my throat as Jack's lips curve oh-so-slightly upward in a brief, answering flare of ironic amusement at our shared plight. Oh, yeah, we are SO in control, here, his sardonic gaze sends mutely to me. And as I struggle to prop Teal'c's sagging form more securely between Sam's supportive clasp and my own, I find myself giving Jack an amazingly equable smile as my right eyebrow lifts slightly in rueful agreement.

Oh, yeah, we're gonna kick ass, I send back to him, not at all surprised by this surge of apparent telepathy that's sprung to life between us. It feels good--damned good--to have this connection back again, to be so easily in tune with my best friend and to sense once more the blessed familiarity of his unique soul--fully present now--peering out at me from those slitted amber eyes.

"Leave me," Teal'c rasps suddenly beside me, his voice low and trembling slightly. "You must assist O'Neill now; I will be fine here."

"One of us should stay with you," I reply distractedly, my eyes never leaving the perilous tableau unfolding before me. "Sam--"

"You're the civilian here, Daniel," Sam interrupts, her blue eyes stubborn on mine. "You stay with Teal'c; I'll go with Colonel O'Neill."

"Last I heard, I'm still the c.o. of this less-than-stellar mission," Jack's voice cuts into our low-voiced haggling over who will step forward and who will stay back with Teal'c. As all three of us raise startled eyes to his, he waggles an admonitory finger our way and interjects drily: "Every damned one of you shut up and stay put, and that's final."

"But, sir--" Sam begins, and despite the fact that at least two dozen distinctly unfriendly natives are advancing toward him with implacable resolve, Jack rather insouciantly turns his back on them to level a scathing glare in Sam's direction.

"Major Carter, what part of STAY PUT do you not understand?" he grits out with exaggerated patience, and a slow flush climbs the pale column of Sam's throat as she bites off the protest still lodged unhappily in her gritted teeth.

"Uh, Jack...do you really think it's such a good idea to turn your back on these people?" I hear myself ask with studied nonchalance, and a wry grin teases the corners of Jack's mouth as he watches me tilt my head exaggeratedly toward the restless, disturbingly silent mob behind him.

"I was thinking that maybe if I just ignore them, they'll go away," he offers blandly, standing with deceptive ease in the center of the room; only someone who knows him as well as Sam, Teal'c, and I do would be able to identify the coiled tension vibrating almost imperceptibly below the surface facade of calm he's putting forth now with such admirable panache. To the increasingly pissed-off mob milling about on the gore-slicked floor behind him, Jack must appear almost insultingly indifferent to the formidable threat they represent.

"I don't think that ever actually works, Jack," I inform him regretfully, my eyes darting worriedly to two burly natives who are shoving the others back in their single-minded quest to step right up behind Jack's lean form. The only indication Jack gives of his awareness of their presence is a slight, disturbingly feral narrowing of his eyes; but even as the men reach ham-sized fists to grab his arms, Jack merely shrugs and holds himself loose and unresisting in their grasp.

"Really? Bummer. I mean, back when I was a kid and I was SURE there was a monster in my closet, I always used that trick; I told myself that if I just ignored it, it would get tired of waiting for me to notice it and would go find some other, wussier kid to eat. I guess it worked, cause three decades later here I still am," Jack smiles crookedly, fighting back the grimace of discomfort tugging at his lips as one of the two men holding him gives his left arm a sudden, vicious twist before pinning it behind his back.

"Maybe there are just too many 'monsters' now to be able to ignore them all," I inform him resignedly as the two men force him to his knees, their hands settling with immovable force onto his shoulders to hold him still. "What can we do, Jack?"

His steady brown gaze settles on my somber face as the question leaves my mouth, and he gives me a poignant half-smile that seizes at my chest as a soft shiver of affectionate regret simultaneously ripples through me. I feel my fingers clutch reflexively at Teal'c's muscular arm, fastening there as a reluctant substitute for their intentioned target; a restless ache arrows down my spine as my hand tightens in frustration on the dusky flesh that isn't Jack's, my nails digging lightly into Teal'c's arm as I imagine it's Jack's arm I'm enclosing in carefully intimate support.

"We stand firm, and we tell these people the truth," Jack is saying quietly in answer to my quesion, his eyes never leaving mine as a red-faced woman shoves in close to savagely yank his short hair with blunt, angry fingers. "They've heard endless lies and bowed down to their false god long enough; if they can't handle the facts of who and what Aliph really was, then their society as a whole is in a hallava lot more trouble than we could ever face at their hands."

"They'll kill us; I think that's trouble enough," I murmur evenly, playing my usual role of devil's advocate. Hmm, interesting choice of words, given the tone and circumstances of this mission, I think distractedly as Jack flashes me a sudden, devastatingly affectionate smile. God! I find myself thinking as my throat tightens with unshed tears in the aftermath of that brilliant wattage; only Jack O'Neill could kneel so calmly in the face of all this with such inimitable style.

"I won't let them kill you," he mutters fiercely now, his eyes shooting sparks as they settle on my doubtful face. "It's me they want; I just have to make them see it. An innocent child's blood cries out for vengeance, Daniel," he continues, his voice amazingly soft and restrained as the two men holding him so roughly fend off the infuriated phalanx of arms and legs and bodies struggling to break past their guard and lay hold on my best friend's unresisting body.

"The rest of you are blameless," Jack goes on soberly, "but I OWE Lah'jhan's family. However inadvertent and involuntary my particiapation in his death was, I'm still the reason he's gone. And if this is my punishment for becoming the instrument of that kid's murder, then so be it. These people don't care about that, I know, but the end result will be the same--they've come seeking revenge for Aliph's death, and I am indeed the infidel who killed their god...and the very same bastard who also caused one small boy to die in terrible suffering."

"No, Jack," I interject, my voice trembling with emotion. "You did NOTHING wrong; you were as blameless in that little boy's death as he was, himself; and dammit, Aliph HAD to die. You're not going to sit there and become a martyr to your own guilt, Jack; we won't let you. And in case you haven't noticed, once they're done with you, I believe the rest of us are next in line. How the hell are you going to save our asses if yours is in little pieces all over the room?"

"I'll make a deal with them," Jack murmurs unconvincingly, his calm gaze darkening with the first, reluctant intimations of unease I've seen since the mob's arrival. "I'm the one with the dead god's guts all over me; I'm the blasphemous, deity-killing son of a bitch who slit dear old 'dad' from gullet to groin. The evidence is right here before their eyes, all over me; surely they can see that!"

"Do you think they really care which one of us did the actual deed, sir?" Sam suddenly speaks up, her voice almost angry as she lasers Jack with her piercing blue stare. "Daniel's right, sir; you cannot offer yourself up in the vain hope that they'll let the rest of us go free. And even if they did offer, we'd refuse. Wouldn't we, guys?" she asks, and beside me I feel Teal'c's head bob slowly in concert with my own stubborn nod.

"We would," I agree, my eyes burning into Jack's. "No one gets left behind, Jack; we all get out, or none of us do. So...is there some sort of alternate, last-ditch heroic effort we're going to pull out of our asses to try now, or should the rest of us come over there and join you before they DRAG us over?"

"If I admit that I don't have a plan, is that the same thing as saying we're fucked?" Jack mutters consideringly, a disgruntled gleam sharpening his gaze, and I breathe out on a heavy sigh as Teal'c stirs restlessly in my grasp.

"Um...yes. Pretty much," I murmur apologetically, and Teal'c pulls his head upright with some effort and fastens surprisingly alert dark eyes on Jack's wry features.

"Indubitably," he rasps out, his voice starting out weak but picking up strength and volume as he goes. "And without even the consolation of dinner and a movie beforehand."

At the stoic Jaffa's unexpected outburst of dry humor, Jack's mouth drops with befuddled, increasingly delighted amazement; I can feel my own eyebrows climbing my forehead in disbelief that I really heard what I thought I just heard, but Jack's sudden, raucous bark of laughter reassures me that I did, indeed, hear Teal'c make a joke. And the strangled noise Sam is making on Teal'c's other side provides additional confirmation that I haven't completely lost my mind.

"God, T, you just made my day!" Jack grins, his gore-stiffened clothes fairly crackling with the movement of his body as the two men holding him give him a punitive jerk to express their displeasure with his incomprehensible lack of fear. "Hell, Big Guy, I think you've made my whole week. How about a promotion?"

"I am content to retain the position I currently hold, O'Neill," Teal'c replies with the ghost of a smile, giving Jack a respectful, subtly affectionate tilt of his head. "And I do not believe now is a suitable time to discuss job advancement; we will most likely perish within a very few moments, which will effectively render the whole point of such a conversation moot."

"See, you had me right up to that last part," Jack sighs now, shrugging regretfully as a sudden surge of angry natives from behind almost knocks him flat on his face. "Your material definitely needs work, Teal'c; but I gotta say, that deadpan delivery slays me everytime."

"Should we survive, I will endeavor to 'brush up' on the content of my humorous asides," Teal'c nods gravely, and Sam and I exchange "What drug did we just smoke?" expressions over his head as Jack snorts appreciatively. This whole situation is becoming way too surreal, even for me, and some small, screwy part of me almost wishes the bloodlust-emboldened slaughter would just hurry up and start, already; this suspense is killing my burgeoning ulcer.

"And speaking of surviving," I begin cautiously now as Teal'c pulls himself upright and gently but firmly disengages himself from the protective hold Sam and I have on his arms.

"My symbiote is strong enough now to begin healing me in earnest; I am much better," he explains quietly as both Sam and I shoot him uncertain frowns. "Thank you for your assistance."

"Way to go, Junior," Jack murmurs from across the room, and Teal'c gives him a brief smile.

"Enough of this useless gabbling!" one of the two men holding Jack bellows suddenly, his anger-reddened face turning an interesting shade of puce as he gestures for Sam, Teal'c, and myself to take our places at Jack's side. "You will speak aloud no more; you have murdered our Holy One and are well-blessed that these now present have not already ripped you limb from limb for the heinous atrocity you have committed!"

"Yeah, we admit we're a bit flummoxed that you're all showing such restraint," Jack mutters with genuine curiosity as Sam and I begin helping Teal'c maneuver across the blood-slimed floor to join the festivities. Several members of the mob, both male and female, meet us halfway and press in close on every side, their sullen glares and clenched fists not doing a whole lot to calm the nervous churning in my gut. I foresee intense pain in the near future, I think morosely to myself as my two team mates and I are herded to Jack's side and forced down onto our knees beneath a multitude of rough hands.

"Careful, careful with him!" I hear myself mutter disgustedly as Teal'c goes very pale and sways helplessly on being jerked so fiercely to his still-weak knees. "He's not going anywhere, just get your hands off him!"

"QUIET!" a sour-smelling, pockmark-featured man roars in my face, his saliva spraying me as he draws back a fist and cuffs me soundly upside my head. "NO MORE TALKING!"

"I get that," I murmur under my breath, unable to stop myself from cringing slightly as Spit Man backhands me across the face this time. As my head jerks reflexively to the side, I catch Jack's exasperated scowl and can't decide if he's angrier with the goon who's hitting me or with me for getting myself into trouble with my big mouth yet again.

"Look, fellas, I freely admit that I'm the one who offed your god," Jack begins, smoothly pulling attention away from the rest of us and back onto himself as the meaning of his words sinks in to the mob around us. "Yes, I sliced and diced him, I gutted him, shivved him, killed the motherfucking son of the devil with my own hands...so lay the blame on me, not on these others. They were merely helpless victims, powerless to stop me from my homicidal madness..."

"Your 'God'--your Most Holy One--was not much of a god, if he could die so easily," Teal'c interrupts, his voice cold and implacable beneath the hoarseness that still lingers in his throat. "Could the true God--the Absolute Ruler and Power of all creation--be killed by this lowest of creatures you see before you now?"

As his words are absorbed by the suspicious, angrily muttering herd of people hemming us in, Jack turns his head long enough to mouth, 'Lowest of creatures, T?' to the stoic Jaffa. Aside from a very slightly raised eyebrow, Teal'c makes no reply; and before any of the rest of us can throw in our two cents' worth to take some of the heat off of Teal'c, one of the two men holding onto Jack lifts his head and gazes intensely at something beyond SG-1's decidedly limited line of sight.

"Enough! She comes," the man announces, loudly enough for all to hear; and as Jack and I exchange puzzled glances, the restive but amazingly well-behaved mob becomes very still.

"Don't tell me there's a Mrs. Aliph waiting in the wings to take his place as the One True Deity," Sam mutters apprehensively under her breath, and Teal'c moves his left arm very subtly so that his fingers brush a light, comforting stroke down the pale skin of Sam's right arm where she kneels next to him. She shoots him a brief smile of gratitude for his concern, but before my mind can ponder the possible deeper ramifications of Teal'c's seemingly innocent gesture, the huddled mass of natives surrounding us begins to clear a reluctant path around us.

"Will the Mystery Guest please sign in?" Jack intones in his snarkiest gameshow-host voice, and I have to choke back a completely unexpected snort of laughter as his wonderfully sardonic brown eyes briefly connect with mine in sly complicity. I am rapidly coming to the decision that this mission has long since left the vicinity of Surreal and is now COMPLETELY off in the ether somewhere, when Jack's laconically amused expression suddenly pales into shocked disbelief.

Oh, God, Aliph ISN'T dead, I think with stunned despair, convinced that nothing else could put such a haunted expression on my best friend's face. For Jack to suddenly go to pieces like this when he's endured so much horror with such sheer gutsiness and attitude...God, it has to be something truly heinous.

I'm suddenly certain I do NOT want to lift my eyes and see just who it is that has him going so dead-white pale and still; but I realize I HAVE to know, have to see what it is that he's seeing...and though I know that he's so out of it now that he's unaware of anything BUT the figure moving toward us, I find myself reaching out to him nonetheless, sliding my hand into the lax tangle of his fingers and gripping hard with my own fingers to let him know he's not alone, that I'm right here with him through whatever this is--whoever this is--that's coming. With his hand in mine, and feeling a convulsive tightening of Jack's fingers beneath my own as his stricken eyes chart the progress of our mysterious new arrival, I finally force myself to look up and behold the slight, robed figure of a young woman making her way through the mob to stand directly before Jack.

I know you, I think agitatedly as I study the elusively familiar figure gazing down now at Jack. Jack's hand is cold and dead in mine, his pulse beating with dismaying rapidity beneath the curve of my index finger where it stretches along his wrist; his expression as he gazes up at this unknown female is so filled with helpless grief and sorrow and mind-numbing guilt that the truth hits me like a bolt of killer lightning from the blue. Oh, God, I know now who this is; I HAVE seen her before, cradling the limp, bloodied body of her dead child in her arms as Jack looked on in mute horror, his own empty arms trembling convulsively in a feverish ague of guilt and rage.

Lah'jhan's mother, I identify this ordinary, mildly attractive woman standing now before Jack; and as eyes as deep and dark and ineffable as endless midnight bore into my best friend's tortured amber gaze, I comprehend with a feeling of sick dread that THIS is the avenging angel with the only real power to destroy Jack O'Neill's immortal soul.

* * *

Part XX.

I can't do this. Oh, God, this is too hard; it's too much. Her eyes have become the world, and I can't escape the judgment that awaits me in their dark, silent depths.

I can feel Daniel clasping my hand, and some small, distant part of my mind takes vague comfort in the simple, eloquent supportiveness of this physical contact between us. I know it's his way of reminding me that he's here for me--that they're ALL here for me, Sam and Teal'c, as well. But Daniel knows that none of them can take this cup from me; none of them can do or say a damned thing to erase the truth that this woman's child was taken from her because of who I am and because of the dark, scarred memories of another small boy that I carry in my mind and soul.

"Jack?..." Daniel begins now on a low, worried murmur, his tone rising to a question that falters and dies away with the brief, hard squeeze of my fingers around his. No, I refuse him, mutely transmitting both gratitude and implacability with the firm pressure of my hand against his. NO. This is mine alone; this far and no further for you, Daniel.

And as the group of natives tighten ranks around us, I am only peripherally aware of their rough hands dragging Daniel, Sam, and Teal'c to a spot in the room several feet away from me. My team's tense protests fade into the background of my consciousness as my eyes stay glued to those of Lah'jhan's mother, and I taste the bitter acridness of grief and bile rising in my throat as the slender woman standing before me slowly extends a hand toward my face, stopping short mere inches from brushing her fingers across my lips. I can't read the expression on her pale features, but the hand she drops once again to her side trembles as it withdraws.

"Are you now truly Darius, son of the fallen God?" she murmurs quietly, a terrible, deliberate calmness holding her voice steady and inflectionless as she peers down into my eyes. "Was my child's life--was the innocent soul of one small boy--indeed sufficient to complete the transformation? Was Lah'jhan's blood the magic elixir needed to drive out the tortured, fallen soul of the offworlder, Oh-Neal, to incarnate in his place the spirit of Aliph's one, true son? And did this same son--this much-vaunted messiah who kneels before me now--then savagely butcher the God of us all?"

Violet eyes made black with a mixture of grief and disdain stab straight into my heart, and I flinch helplessly as a very real spasm of brutal pain radiates suddenly outward from the center of my chest, the force of it freezing the breath in my lungs. My eyes burn with the sting of tears, and I find myself blinking rapidly to clear my vision, my shattered soul holding grimly to the sight of this lone woman standing so spare and powerful, her will bolstered and fueled by the immutable strength of a mother's inconsolable grief and fury.

"Darius didn't kill your god, ma'am," I hear myself murmur now, my voice low and respectful and inexpressibly weary. The rawness of my own grief for Lah'jhan's tragic death adds a rough edge to my words as I continue hoarsely: "I killed him--me, alone, all on my own. Colonel Johnathon O'Neill, commander of SG-1 of Earth, owner of this body and of this soul...I'M the one who murdered Aliph, the one who drove the knife into his lying, festering, evil body and sent his less-than-divine soul straight to Hell. I'm sorry, ma'am, but he really wasn't a god at all, much less THE God of All."

"So now you kneel before me and tell me that my child died for nothing, that Lah'jhan suffered so horribly merely because some stubborn offworlder refused to submit to the fate ordained for him, a fate decreed from the beginning by the Most High." The voice pummeling my senses has tightened, every word bitten out short and sharp with embittered pain. "I know that my son resembled your own lost child, Oh-Neal; this much I grasped early on, and within your eyes I beheld a world of pain and loss welling up from your soul with the memories his presence stirred in you, memories of your own dead boy. And I allow that in your way you cared for my Lah'jhan; I saw it in your gentleness toward him, in the smiles you gave him."

The harsh censure in her voice has dipped into something small and fragile and unbearably poignant, and I want so desperately to look away from her, to close both my heart and my mind from this pain, this ovewhelming guilt, eating me from the inside out. But this is justice, this is retribution; this is where I belong now, and no price she asks of me will be too great.

"You cared for my 'Jhanny...and yet you did nothing to save him," she accuses now, her voice going hard and cold again. "YOU should have died in his place, Oh-Neal; at the very least, you should not have let him go alone across the Great Barrier between the living and the dead. You should have accompanied him, should have carried him safely in your arms to the Other World so that the journey would not have been so lonely and so frightening for him. You failed in the most sacred duty your deepest soul demanded of you, and yet still you live...still you breathe."

"Yes...still I breathe," I rasp out, heedless of the tremors arcing like a palsy up and down the length of my body; my voice is raw with the corrosive poison of my own abject guilt, and I know I will see those eyes--those fathomless, spirit-drained mother's eyes--in tortured dreams for whatever's left of my miserable life.

"Was it worth it, Oh-Neal?" the woman before me continues relentlessly, and I realize with numb frustration that I don't even know her name. My God, her son died because of me, and I couldn't even learn her NAME?

"Is your soul truly worth more than that of my son?" she is grilling me now, her fierce gaze merciless on my face. "Is your life so valuable that you would kill God Himself to preserve it, leaving a whole society in utter chaos in your wake?"

"No...no, it's not so valuable," I mumble flatly, vaguely aware of Daniel voicing a low but vociferous denial in the background. "Not so valuable at all."

"Your clothes are smeared with the blood of our God; the stench and filth of his bowels clings to you like a sickness," my judge continues as though I had not spoken. "You freely admit to murdering the Highest, to driving His Godhood from the shell of this ruined body?"

"I killed him," I corroborate her accusation, my voice toneless. "But I don't believe he was a god; he was just a man, just like every man here." As angry rumbles of discontent stir behind me, I draw in a tired breath and plow doggedly onward.

"He was wily enough to deceive you for years, to hold your entire society under some sort of religious subjugation; I'm sorry if that offends you and your people, here, but it's the truth. If he was truly God, He would have killed me without the least bit of effort well before I could ever have gotten near him; if he was God, he would have had no need to use torture and duress to brainwash me into thinking I was someone else--into believing I was the incarnation of this Darius, his supposed son."

My voice has tightened with suppressed rage, a rage directed not against the woman before me but against the sick bastard lying dead in the floor behind me. As Lah'jhan's mother listens without visible expression to my tirade, I feel a surge of grief-stricken bitterness well up within me and am helpless to prevent its overflow as more words spill from my dry lips.

"And I just have to add that, even though our own holy book back on Earth sometimes seems to represent God as a Being of great wrath and vengeance, I personally don't believe that any God worth His salt would EVER brutally murder an innocent child. Aliph wasn't God, ma'am; he was just an evil man who took your son from you to further his own agenda, a man who used me in an attempt to increase his own corrupt power. I can't give Lah'jhan back to you--if my death could accomplish that, then I would gladly die a hundred times over to bring him back. But I can't return him to you. And I can never remove the pain and horror of what he suffered--of what YOU suffered and will continue to suffer now without him. For that I am deeply sorry, more sorry than you can know. But I can't take it back; I can't...fix this."

My voice is raw and trembling, my limbs leaden as I bow my head and fight back the rush of acid bile threatening to erupt in a shower of indigestible guilt from my burning throat. I hear Sam make some sort of low, grief-stricken moan from somewhere off to my left, and dimly I realize that the sound is her way of expressing the helpless empathy she's feeling for me now as I accept my culpability in the death of this mother's hopes and dreams for the future, for the loss of that singular, inexpressible parental joy that she'll never share again with one sweet little boy.

"Anoria..." one of the men in the throng of natives mutters roughly now, and I sense the bereaved form standing over me transfer the almost palpable chill of her relentless gaze from my bowed head just long enough to bark out a brusque order for silence to the one who spoke her name. I can feel the massed hostility roiling in the air all around me as it radiates in tense waves from those who are now bearing witness to the shocking end of untold years of a strongly held belief system; their fear and their angry confusion is thick in the atmosphere, and I'm surprised they've held off this long on the whole revenge thing. I also find myself surprised and silently impressed by the power of this woman--Anoria--to hold her fellow citizens at bay this long--long enough, perhaps, to extract her own pound of flesh from the s.o.b. who caused her child to die. But the natives are indeed growing restless, and I raise my gaze to hers again now, silently adjuring her to get on with it before these others take the choice away from her.

"You believe we have come to punish you for killing our God, our esteemed Creator," Anoria murmurs to me, and the hint of dark irony I surprise in her unblinking regard sends a strange little chill down my back. "You believe that we can look at the butchered remains of this pathetic corpse and continue to cling to the notion that he really WAS the God of All, really was the One who made us."

"Well, um...actually, that IS sort of the impression you've been giving," Daniel speaks up softly but stubbornly from across the room, and I find myself wavering between the desire to turn and scowl blackly at him and an equally strong urge to snort dry laughter at his matter-of-fact tone.

"We have been watching you, Oh-Neal," Anoria speaks, sparing only the briefest flicker of a peeved glare in Daniel's direction as one of her cohorts cuts my team mate off short by the simple expedient of planting a fist in some obviously tender portion of Daniel's anatomy. Daniel's muffled grunt of pain is swallowed up in the darkness of Anoria's eyes as she leans in close to me, her hand darting out to fasten tightly around my jaw, fingernails digging into my skin with indifferent force.

"Over the years we have witnessed many of our kind give themselves in service to Aliph, some voluntarily, some not; we have seen him 'incarnate' his son over and over, all the while explaining to the rest of us that it was a test of our faith, a way for us to prove our undying loyalty to He who made us by offering our very lives and souls up to him to use as He wished. He explained to us that Darius was a spirit being of such power and energy that he quickly used up all the bodies sent to house him; when you four came to our world, Aliph announced that your bodies were different, stronger. He claimed that he would be able to prepare one of you to accept Darius's spirit and that you would survive the experience for a much longer time, thus sparing the rest of us from that particular service. Even had we wished to contest his decision, we were powerless to do so; our 'God's' inner circle of protectors has become much too strong for the commoners among us to rebel or protest in any way."

Her gaze never leaving mine, Anoria lightly scratches her nails along the side of my jaw, the sensation bordering just on the edge of painful; heedless of the stiffening in my knees from such prolonged contact with the hard floor beneath me, I hold myself still and offer no resistance as sudden wrath flares in her eyes, transmitting itself from her gaze to her hold on my face. As the points of her nails dig into my flesh, releasing a stinging trickle of blood along my jawbone, her voice fills with a pain so virulent and so intense that I want to curl protectively inward, desperate to ward off the raw agony coming off her in wave after anguished wave.

"I made myself believe," she whispers to me now, her fingers trembling violently as they score furrows in my cheeks. "Even when his people came to take my child from me, assuring me that Lah'jhan would be returned to me unharmed and that his service to Aliph would be handsomely rewarded both here and in the Other World...even then I told myself to keep faith, to trust that my son would indeed come back to me, his beautiful head heaped with glory and honor and praises from our Most High. I was too weak in my soul, too frightened, to do other than submit. Somewhere deep inside myself, in my truest soul, I knew my child was doomed; I knew I was handing him over to the dark Master and not to a benevolent God.There were others, you see, others who felt as I did, and sometimes we gathered in secret to talk...at first I thought it was that which had them taking my son from me; I thought that maybe they had been spying on me and knew of my heresy..."

"It wasn't your fault," I begin hoarsely, my soul writhing with the anguish I see in Anoria's tormented eyes. "You had no choice, He would have taken the boy regardless--"

"But I did have a choice," Anoria informs me with deadly calm, a slow rain of tears beginning to trickle unnoticed down her pale cheeks as she gives me the most bitter, self-loathing smile I have ever seen. "I had the choice to die in defense of my child, to give up my life in the attempt--however vain and hopeless--to keep my son away from that butcher. But I let them take him, let Aliph twist 'Jhanny's innocent little mind into believing YOU were his father, his sire, when his true sire died years ago. I did nothing to prevent his being sent to you; even when I realized WHY my son had been chosen, WHY Aliph wanted him so badly, I told myself it would yet be all right. I made myself believe that you would submit quickly to our God's will, that my child would be returned to me once Darius inhabited your form and your own soul was sent away forever...I even convinced myself that if worse came to worse, you, Oh-Neal, would save Lah'jhan yourself before you would allow anything--whether man, beast, or God--to harm him."

"And I failed you...I failed Lah'jhan, too," I murmur, my reply so soft I'm not even sure she can understand the words. But she does understand, I see it in her eyes; and she releases my bruised and bleeding face with a terrible, empty bleakness falling like a heavy curtain over her colorless features.

"We failed him together," she whispers, leaning in close and closer still until her lips are poised a hair's breadth from my own. "Tell me, Oh-Neal; did you kill the false god because of what he did to you and to your comrades...or did you kill him because he murdered my child, because he made you a partner to his own evil? Were you after vengeance for 'Jhanny...or were you merely trying to find expiation for your own sins?"

I can sense that my answer now is very important to her--crucial, actually--and I'm also aware that I cannot and will not lie to her, not even to save my team. If I'm anything less than honest and sincere, we'll all be done for, anyway. I feel it, I know it deep inside. It's a heavy load to bear, but nothing in comparison to the brutality suffered by one lost little boy. My voice is steady now, my eyes clear and calm on Anoria's as I nod once and murmur my reply.

"It was a little of both," I admit, uncaring that several in the crowd around my team are hissing in disapproval at my response. "The son of a bitch deserved to die ten times over for what he did to Lah'jhan, for ALL the evil he's perpetrated on your people for all these years. I'm not sorry I killed him; I'd like to do it again, if I could. But it wasn't JUST for your son or for you that I killed him--you're right about that, as well. He tortured my friends, tortured ME and screwed with my head till I didn't know who I was anymore... because of him I hurt the people I care most about, did terrible things to them..."

I find that I have to close my eyes now as sudden, horrifying visions of my own demonically contorted face looming over Daniel flash into my consciousness; I see it all so clearly, Daniel strapped down to a table of some sort, his tightly restrained body arching up off the hard surface beneath him in unbearable agony as his feet drum a frantic, spasming rhythm against the wood under his heels...Oh, God, what did I DO to him, how could I have EVER hurt him like that, how could I have done those things to him? A choked groan escapes me as the agonized sound of my best friend's guttural screams echo in my memory, and I wonder now how in the hell he can even stand to be in the same room with me, much less hold my hand as he did moments ago while offering me his usual solid support. Oh, jeez, Daniel, I am just SO fucking sorry...And I don't even want to know what I must have done to Carter and Teal'c.

But there's no time to think about that right now; Anoria's eyes are burning into mine, searing me right down to my core, and off to the side several of her companions begin urging her to let them teach me a lesson, demanding their turn on the great wheel of rage and revenge threatening to spin out of control here in the confines of this room. I hold myself still, fighting against my own, instinctive need to take action, to surge up from this blood-smeared floor and do all in my power to keep my team from any further harm. The mob milling about so sullenly with their furious eyes and hungry, clenching fists won't be held in abeyance much longer by their appointed spokeswoman; and as Anoria holds my gaze with hers, I know she realizes it, too.

"These belong to me," she announces suddenly, decisively, her voice loud and firm as she draws away from me and stands with both hands fisted on her slender hips. The stance of her body is one that will brook no opposition, and for a moment the crowd pressing in so closely and so threateningly around my team freezes in startled silence, various expressions of surprise and growing anger rippling across individual faces in the group. For the briefest instant it almost seems that the small mob will cave in without a fight, that they will defer to Anoria's wishes without demur; but then an almost visible vibration of resentment and disagreement shudders its way through the crowd, and my stomach drops to my feet as I realize what this means for my team and myself.

"He killed our god," a surly, unkempt man standing just behind Teal'c rumbles ominously, his brows drawing down over glittering black eyes. "He has disrupted the safety and sanctity of our whole society, and you expect us merely to turn him and his offworlder friends over to YOU? No. We came here for vengeance, for justice; we came to mete out that justice to the infidels."

"Do not play games with me, Traylar," Anoria replies with a dark rage building in her voice. "Each and every one of you here knows in your deepest heart that Aliph was no god; that, just as Oh-Neal so aptly stated, he certainly was not THE God. For months now we have been gathering our courage in secret, planning clandestine meetings, speaking in hushed, hurried tones of overthrowing 'God' and freeing our people from this living hell...and yet now, when deliverance has finally come, you are too cowardly to embrace it."

"I know what this is, what you mean to do," Lah'jhan's mother continues with inexorable force, her eyes flashing contempt at the ones who came here with her. "You think that if you are seen to take part in some sort of vengeful retribution against these offworlders, that those in power who have been protecting Aliph--and who will doubtless quickly insert another false god to take his place--will view you as heroes rather than discovering your true duplicity. I can smell it in you already, the fear and the repression; rather than standing strong now against the tattered remnants of Aliph's retinue, you will cave in before their bullying and their threats and give them time to shore up their defenses, to reestablish their absolute authority. You are no better than Oh-Neal; your actions here today will have made my child's death mean absolutely NOTHING. Such cowardice is not what you promised me; I will NOT accept defeat and continued subjugation as my son's final legacy to this world and to the people he belonged to. I am shamed by your conduct, disgusted by this neverending cycle of violence and brutality."

As the disheveled phalanx of subdued natives mutters and grumbles and sends threatening glares in the direction of myself and my team, Anoria turns slowly back to me and reaches a slightly trembling hand toward my face. Her tone is harsh, but her gaze is strangely gentle as she tosses stringent words back over her shoulder:

"I claim first rights on this man, on the assassin of false gods; perhaps it was through no fault of his own, but his presence here--and the memories inside his mind--created the impetus behind my son's senseless death. He owes me a debt he can never repay, and it is my RIGHT to demand retribution in whatever way I see fit."

"And just what form will that retribution take?" someone calls out from the crowd; I can hear several muttered suggestions as to which course of action Anoria should pursue, and some of the ideas bouncing around definitely weigh heavy on the pain and suffering scale. Briefly I turn my head to the side, my gaze locking with Daniel's where he kneels unhappily between Sam and Teal'c; his eyes are dark with foreboding, but he lifts the corners of his mouth in the tiniest of half-smiles as I crook one eyebrow at him in an expression of sardonic resignation. How are we doing, Daniel? I send to him with a dry grimace, and the corresponding lift of his right eyebrow sends back the expected answer: About as bad as usual, Jack. It has become a code of sorts between us, a standard bit of repartee under pressure; and the inclusion of it now, in the middle of this fucked-up mission, is undeniably comforting.

"I have decided already upon his punishment," Anoria says now, her tone stiff with warning for those who have begun making ominous mutterings about lynchings and beheadings and such; as my attention leaves Daniel's worried face and swings back to Lah'jhan's mother, I feel suddenly ashamed of myself for forgetting even for a second that we are in this position now because I screwed up so badly, because I let an insane maniac butcher an innocent kid.

"Are you prepared now to accept my judgment, Oh-Neall?" Anoria asks me, shutting out the voices complaining behind us through the intensity of her gaze on my face. All I can do is nod, some part of my soul surging up almost eagerly to face whatever retribution this strong but emotionally ravaged woman has in her to unload on me. As I kneel in silence before her, my aching knees wobbling a bit unsteadily in drying pools of Aliph gore, Anoria merely stands staring down at me with a closed expression before suddenly darting out a hand to swing it at my face with impressive force.

I keep my eyes trained on her, unblinking, unflinching, waiting for the sharp sting of her palm against my cheek and for whatever follows after; she could never hurt me enough to make up for the loss of Lah'jhan, for the empty days ahead with no warm, giggly ball of delightful boyhood snuggled on her lap for hugs and kisses and a story or two. I'm no masochist, but if it will help at all with the intense pain inside her soul, I will offer myself up gladly for all the physical abuse Anoria can dish out to me. I can sense the strained tension radiating from my team mates as they wait as well, braced for the loud impact of flesh on flesh, and I can only hope that once she's done with me, Anoria might be persuaded to plea with her fellow citizens for mercy for my friends. So far we've been damned lucky; as lynch mobs go, this one has been remarkably tame. But I guess it makes sense; if the people in this room were already more than half convinced that good old Aliph was a fraud, then that will make it difficult for them to turn so brutally against those who accomplished what they themselves secretly longed to do. I suppose the big dilemma facing us now is whether or not these people will have the strength of their convictions, whether they'll have the courage to go up against Aliph's secret cabal and a town filled with frightened, spiritually beaten down citizens looking for a focus for their fears, for their rage at having the status quo so brutally interrupted...never mind that things couldn't have been all that peachy under Aliph's dominion.

Caught up in thoughts of worry for the rest of my team, it takes me a long, befuddled second to realize that the forceful hand swinging at my face has stopped its forward momentum with rather startling abruptness; as Anoria's flattened palm jerks to a halt less than an inch from my face, I lift mystified eyes to hers to discover something deep and still and almost mystically knowing peering back at me from her dilated pupils.

"Aliph was no god; neither am I. How then can I judge; how can I inflict more pain, more suffering on another being, thereby further blackening the interior of my own soul?" Anoria sighs deeply, her chin quivering with the effort to hold back her emotions. " Lah'jhan would expect better from me," she continues resolutely. "It's not the way I would teach him to react, to behave. I see in your eyes, Oh-Neal, the truth that you will be a far more effective purveyor of your own punishment than any outside force could ever hope to match. Every single day you will carry the knowledge of what has happened here; as the years pass on your world, you will remember how one little boy on THIS world was never allowed to grow up, to choose a profession and a wife, to present his aging mother with grandchildren to spoil. Each time you visit the burial place of your own son, you will say a prayer for mine, as well; you will never forget. This is what I require of you; this is what must be."

"I never will forget," I murmur gravely, speaking nothing more than the truth. "I won't forget Lah'jhan; I won't forget you. None of us will forget the mercy you've shown us here today, either," I add softly as my gaze flickers to the rest of my team, watching in somber silence.

"You expect us just to let them go?" a heavyset woman growls angrily, sliding forward to grab a painful handful of Carter's blonde hair. "You would have us fling wide the doors leading from the city and watch as these four leave us here to suffer the terrible consequences of their uninvited actions? No; we will not stand for it! We won't let the offworlders go; they will answer for what they have done here today!"

"They must die, Anoria; surely you can see that," a skinny, rope-veined stick of a man speaks up, his huge adam's apple bobbing nervously up and down as his gaze flits evasively from Anoria to his fellow malcontents to my kneeling team mates. "We WILL begin to speak for ourselves, to take back some control over our lives and our destinies; but these things take time and care and...and caution. It wouldn't do for all of us to end up in prison or worse, forced to take the blame for the most heinous sin a soul could ever carry out. We did NOT murder Aliph, be he god or no; we will NOT stay here and be accused of such a despicable act! These offworlders are responsible for all the evil that has gone on here on this infamous day; they must pay!"

"Here! Here!" the majority of the crowd cries out with disturbing enthusiasm, and Anoria has to shout several times, her voice increasingly hoarse and desperate, before the agitated hubbub around us finally settles enough for her words to be heard clearly.

"You say, Elar, that the killing of Aliph, a mere man really no different than any of the rest of you here, is a heinous sin," she begins with slow fury. "And yet you would condone the equally brutal murder of these offworlders, deceiving yourselves all the while that somehow they don't count because they are not of us. I am aware that a goodly portion of you are already questioning whether or not these four even have souls. I say to you now that such speculation is pointless; in the long run it matters not whether these have souls. It matters only that WE do. And unless your soul is as black and as twisted with evil as the one Oh-Neal slew in order to rescue himself and his friends, then you will follow the paths of mercy the Ancient Knowledge once taught, and you will allow these beings to go free. They have no part in this any longer; they are unimportant. What WE do next, the direction WE choose to go, is all that matters."

As my eyes widen in mute amazement and genuine admiration for the impassioned speech she has just made, Anoria turns to me again and places both hands on my shoulders, grimacing a bit with the strain as she urges me to try rising to my feet.

"They are really not so bad," she mutters drily as I struggle to straighten out my cramped knee joints and stagger stiffly to a rather unsteady standing position. "Their terror of the unknown makes them cruel and foolish, but they surely know enough to do the right thing." With that last remark Lah'jhan's mother swivels her fiercest gaze on the mob of almost comically chagrined townspeople huddling behind my team.

"This is our battle now, my friends, and the sooner we have these four offworlders out of our collective business, the sooner we can get down to the serious work of returning this broken city to something approaching sanity. I WILL make sure that my child died for a purpose, and I dare any of you to stop me." Her dark eyes flashing fire, Anoria gestures imperiously toward my still-kneeling team mates and orders the natives holding onto them to release them.

For a long moment it appears that her impassioned and incomparable speech was all for naught; a veritable sea of disgruntled, grudging faces glares from Anoria and me to my team and back again, and I find myself literally holding my breath as I await the outcome of this bizarre stand-off. The battle of wills raging between Lah'jhan's petite mother and the would-be subversives of this brutally subjugated society hovers on a knife's edge for several endless, pulse-pounding moments; and in the breathless vacuum of this strained limbo, I find myself anxiously studying my friends' uncomfortably huddled bodies to reassure myself that they will all be able to go ambulatory and haul some serious ass very soon if this situation should happen to turn in our favor.

Teal'c still looks dismayingly weak and sick, his complexion a nasty grayish shade; but the look of calm readiness I see in his brief glance my way clues me in that he should be able to at least make it as far as the outskirts of this hellhole. After that, I'll be happy to carry him piggyback the rest of the way to the stargate if necessary. Daniel isn't looking too hot, either, and who can blame him after everything I put him through when I thought I was Darius. But the look he gives me now is every bit as sternly stubborn and resolute as Teal'c's, and I find myself nodding briefly to him, letting him know I get the message. Carter is hurting, that much is obvious despite her stoic efforts to hide her discomfort; I won't let myself even go near the memories roiling just beneath the surface of my mind concerning my interaction with her in the guise of Darius. For now all I need to know--all I WANT to know--is that she's in good enough shape to make it back to the gate unaided. The mulish glint that appears in her blue eyes beneath my speculative scrutiny tells me that she'll do just fine; and with that element of concern safely dealt with, I turn my attention back to the breathlessly awaited decision of the mob shuffling its collective feet around us.

There's no place like home, there's no place like home, I hear the words trill nonsensically round and round in my aching head as my exhausted gaze rests on Anoria's tense face; and as visions of myself in ruby slippers with a scruffy little dog tucked under my arm turn this ordeal into a surrealistic fantasy nightmare in my brain, the inimitable Traylar steps forward, complete with a formidable Oz-worthy frown, to deliver the mob's final verdict.

* * *

Pt. XXI.

I can't believe they're going to let us go; one minute we're all kneeling down in Aliph's blood and guts, surrounded by angry natives champing at the bit while Lah'jhan's mother puts Colonel O'Neill through a version of Purgatory sublime in both its pathos and subtle cruelty...and then, before any of us really even has the time to try to come up with some desperate, last-ditch effort to keep the natives from carrying out their own brand of vigilante justice, the whole thing comes to a jarringly abrupt end awith Anoria's soft, anticlimactic pronouncement:

"Release them. No more of this; just...let them go."

For a long, breathless interval it seems that her quiet but nonetheless firm command will not be followed; the mood of the crowd pressing in on all sides around us is decidedly hostile, and I can feel both Daniel and Teal'c tensing up anew as they kneel stiffly beside me. My own heart is thumping erratically in my chest, and I find my gaze fixating on the Colonel, the action almost instinctive as I try to gauge his reaction to Anoria's decree.

From his own kneeling posture at Anoria's feet, I am able to see the briefest, telltale tightening of his shoulders as the meaning of her words sinks into his exhausted, guilt-ravaged brain; for only a second his half-bowed head lifts sharply, his eyes seeking out Anoria's carefully impassive features, and I chafe futiley at the realization that I'm unable to see the expression on his face as he looks up at her. Something flickers in her gaze in response to whatever it was she just saw in his; an expression dark and weary and inexpressibly grieved, yet at the same time unaccountably gentle, ghosts across her eyes, and then the Colonel's head drops again, his shoulders slumping almost bonelessly beneath the terrible, combined weight of this woman's judgment and his own.

For another, timeless breath he sways there beneath her regard, wavering between frightful remorse and an almost heartbreaking need to reach out for cleansing, for absolution. Something close to a sob hitches wordlessly in his chest, and as he clenches his jaw to contain it within the cracked shell of his soul, he relinquishes any further semblance of self-control and seems to fall into a hazy sort of relieved resignation, his gore-streaked hands uncurling in slow increments, his fingers falling open in peaceful surrender.

Tears well up in my eyes at the sight of him kneeling so silent and vulnerable, clothes and body encrusted with the physical evidence of the evil he's fought so hard to destroy--even at the prohibitive cost to his own sanity and spirit. Dimly I'm aware of Daniel's sharply indrawn breath nearby, an abrupt gasp that contains and reflects back to the room all the empathetic pain he's feeling on the Colonel's behalf; and when I turn my own blurred eyes to his, the dark suffering that slams into me from Daniel's silent gaze stuns me into agonized breathlessness.

Oh, God, I find myself thinking almost wildly as all four of us are suddenly and unceremoniously dragged to our feet; getting out of here suddenly sounds almost easy compared to the brutal after-effects this horrible mission is going to have on us, both individually and as a team. But especially on the Colonel. After everything he's been through, after all that was done to him here and the things he did to US while under Aliphs's influence, how will he reconcile all that's happened with his own internal code of ethics? He has always been hardest on himself above all, and the death of yet another little boy he felt such a strong responsibility for is a tragedy that has the potential to break him utterly if he can't somehow find self-forgiveness within his soul for a situation that was completely beyond his control.

"You will be escorted to the far north gate," Anoria is saying now, directing her words to Colonel O'Neill, and I shrug off the painful clasp of native fingers digging into my arms as I struggle to stand unassisted, dismayed by the weakness and vertigo coursing through my system. "You must go quickly, before the rest of Aliph's inner guard sounds the alarm and the city is locked down. Traylar will lead the escort, and you will follow his directions without argument if you wish to escape with your lives. Is that understood?"

As Anoria's eyes flash around at all of us, her fellow citizens included, I can feel an angry protest rising in my throat at the idea of Traylar being trusted to lead us ANYWHERE after his earlier comments. And Traylar's expression of disgust doesn't do much to boost my pretty much nonexistent confidence in putting our lives into his hands; but after a hurried, infuriated exchange between our reluctant guide and Anoria--their words unfortunately hissed in tones too low for me to understand--Traylar finally nods grudgingly and turns a distinctly ominous scowl first on the Colonel and then on the rest of us.

"I will take you from the city," he mutters with ill grace, brows drawing down in an expression of pure distaste. "I still believe you should not be allowed to live, let alone leave this place; but as much as it pains me to say it, I begin to see the wisdom in Anoria's words. It is imperative that we take back control of our own lives, our own destinies, without the intrusive proddings and interference of insane offworlders who would bring us nothing but more grief and trouble. Come; a small contingent of those of us here will see you swiftly to the far gate. After that you are on your own. And if you or your kind should ever prove so foolish as to try to return here--"

"We won't be coming back," Colonel O'Neill speaks up gruffly, his voice rough-edged with dark exhaustion and something more--something fierce and pained and austerely dignified. "Carter, Daniel, Teal'c...everybody ambulatory?"

Even though he barely seems able to stand himself, his brown eyes lift with dogged determination to sweep up and down the ragged line of his team; as soon as his gaze touches us, the three of us instantly and automatically pull upselves up as straight and as strong as we are able. It's obvious to all of us that he's hanging on by a thread; and even though the knowledge that we are not much better off glitters in his eyes, the pain of that awareness is tempered by the flash of pride that flares briefly in his gaze as he scrutinizes each one of us.

"We're good to go, sir," I murmur quietly in response to his query, and Daniel nods silent agreement next to me, his hand surreptitiously sliding up to give my arm a reassuring squeeze.

"Let us leave this place quickly," Teal'c rumbles, and the restrained vehemence in his tone echoes the feeling of urgency churning within us all.

"Daniel, help Teal'c," Colonel O'Neill orders, forestalling any protest on Teal'c's part with the admonitory lifting of one hand in his direction. The truncated frown the commander sends Teal'c speaks volumes concerning his awareness that Daniel isn't exactly in stellar condition himself; but it's obvious that for once Teal'c is the weaker of the two, and Daniel steps up willingly now to carry out Jack's orders. "Both of you watch our backs as we go," the Colonel adds, and Teal'c gives a brief, somewhat chagrined bob of his head.

"Carter, you're with me." Colonel O'Neill gestures wearily in my direction, and I nod wordlessly and do my best not to fall over my own feet as I take a cautious step toward him. Beside me Daniel releases his hold on my arm, his fingers trailing one last, private message along my skin before dropping away: Look after him. The words tingle along my nerve endings in the wake of his caress, and I turn to Daniel just long enough to nod my understanding. Yes, I will.

"You will not forget the experiences you have had here; you will not forget Lah'jhan," Anoria speaks suddenly, the words emerging half on the order of a command, half on the order of a plea. "And on our part, we will not forget what you did here today, Oh-Neal."

"Good luck to you, Anoria," Jack murmurs evenly now in a tone that struggles for sincerity but only manages a flat, exhausted sort of civility. "And thank you...for our lives."

"My son will now be remembered in two worlds, Oh-Neal," Anoria speaks out, a rising note of some wild, strange pride sounding in the words. "Though our paths will never cross again, for as long as we live his memory will yet be honored and will bind our races beyond these sad events, far beyond this single day. You will see to it, Oh-Neal; I will see to it."

"Yes," the Colonel replies, turning one last time to look into the determined face of Lah'jhan's mother. He trembles slightly as he gives her a slow, grave nod of his head, and as I step up behind him I realize I am bracing myself to catch him if he should lose what's left of his waning strength and collapse. But he pulls himself straight through sheer effort of will and flaps one absent, disgruntled hand behind his back, shooing me away from his immediate personal space.

"Good-bye, Anoria," he murmurs, a note of sober regret in his voice. "Good-bye and...godspeed." A small gasp escapes her at this last; but as an intense look passes between the two of them, it becomes obvious that the Colonel meant nothing profane or disrespectful by the remark. I find myself thinking that his parting words were delivered not in a spirit of sarcasm but more as a message of hope and of renewal for these people as they head off into a new and no doubt perilous future.

Apparently Anoria has chosen to take his words in that spirit, as well, for she nods once, gravely, and then turns abruptly away, calling for Traylar and the four surly men he has chosen to escort us to the north gate and from there, hopefully to the stargate, to home and freedom.

"After you, pal," the Colonel mutters as Traylar stomps over and scowls forbiddingly at him. "Sorry we don't have time to clean up after ourselves, but then, that's what the rest of you are here to do, isn't it?"

"Get moving before I change my mind!" Traylar snaps angrily, and as he whirls around and storms toward the closed door across the room, his four friends herd Teal'c, Daniel, the Colonel, and myself in his wake as if we're a small herd of wayward sheep. The reek of blood and fear and death settles heavily on the air behind us as we near the doorway and the blessed promise of redemption from this hellhole; I can feel the poisonous glares of the other natives drilling into my back as I walk alongside Colonel O'Neill, and I force myself to breathe evenly as we pass together through the narrow portal in Traylar's furious wake. God, just get us out of this insane asylum, just get us to the 'gate, I can hear myself repeating over and over inside my head; and as my worried gaze surreptitiously takes in the gore-splattered, sickeningly pale visage of Jack O'Neill striding grimly and somewhat unsteadily along at my side, I find myself suddenly feeling almost desperate to get him out of here, to rush him back to the SGC and into Janet Fraiser's capable hands before he's used up the last dregs of the adrenaline fumes he's currently running on and crashes and burns bigtime.

Hang in there, sir, I urge silently as we make a covert run for our lives through the busiest sector of the city, trying not so successfully to blend in with the teeming masses pressing around us on every side on the narrow, crowded walkways. We're getting out of here, we'll be home soon...I chant to him in my mind.

But as we make our agonizingly slow and laborious way toward the north gate, hustled unceremoniously along by Traylar and his nervous cohorts, I know that the Colonel isn't going to make it much further. Throwing a fretful glance back over my shoulder, I can see that Teal'c is doing his best to convince Daniel that he needs no assistance in traversing the city; his dark face is set into implacable lines of grim determination, and to the apprehensive natives milling on all sides I'm sure he looks very formidable. But I know him too well to buy his tough guy act; Teal'c is hurting and is almost as weak and enervated as the Colonel, and it is mainly through sheer willpower that he is able to keep planting one foot in front of the other, stubbornly shrugging off Daniel's offers of physical support.

Talk about the blind leading the blind, I snort mutely to myself as my gaze moves to Daniel, taking in the unhealthy sheen of sweat on his too-pale face and his carefully controlled grimaces of discomfort that he can't quite erase completely as he trudges gamely along at Teal'c's side. My own body is screaming out for rest, for pain killers, for water and food and about three straight days of deep, dreamless sleep; but Colonel O'Neill is weaving a bit drunkenly now as he veers away from an impatient native man shoving through the press of people around us, and I push my own exhaustion and injuries to the back of my mind as I step closer and feel a shaky hand encircle my upper arm.

"How much...further?" the Colonel rasps against my ear, and I stifle a pained gasp for breath as he suddenly flounders hard up against me, almost knocking me down. "Son of a bitch!..." he swears shakily, his voice tight with aggravated strain, and as I manage to regain my balance and take the greater portion of his sagging weight against my left hip, he grins weakly at me and mutters:

"Sorry, Carter...guess I shouldn't have...had that...last...nightcap."

"Almost there, sir," I reply as brightly as I can manage, and in that instant I truly do feel a renewed surge of energy flooding my exhausted system with endorphins; my desperate eyes have suddenly spied the blessed, upthrusting posts of the north gate in the near distance, and the sight of our deliverance so near at hand has my heart pounding wildly in my chest.

"The gate, Jack; we can see the gate from here!" Daniel's voice erupts behind us, low and intense and so very, very desperate to get to that gate, to safety; and at the sound of urgency vibrating in Daniel's hoarse tones, the Colonel lifts his pain-glazed eyes and tries to focus on the elusive promise of liberation we seem to be holding so tantalizingly before him.

"Hurry, hurry, you idiots! Look, over there; some of Aliph's guard!" Traylar hisses the warning over his shoulder, his dark eyes wild in his pale, sweaty face, and for a moment I'm convinced he and the others are going to sound the alarm and turn us in themselves, or at the very least abandon us here and leave us to fight our own way through the last of the crowds to the gate. But Colonel O'Neill has rallied his strength, his will, and his eyes are piercing and relentless as he pulls himself upright against me and fixes his gaze on Traylar's anxious face.

"Just shut up and get us to that gate," he growls, and something in his tone has the native facing quickly forward again, a brief glint of resentment and something almost like admiration sparking in his eyes as he turns away and pushes a path through the crowd for the rest of us to follow.

It seems to take forever to cover that last fifty feet to the gate, and even before we reach the ornately carved iron doorways that mark the north entrance and exit to the city, all of us can feel the influx of curious, disturbingly unfriendly eyes needling into our spines. Traylar halts on the side of the double-doored gate meant for exiting the city and spends several long, furiously gesticulating moments arguing with the two suspicious wardens of the gate while they glare back at all of us in stubborn resistance to Traylar's insistence that we be granted egress to the outside.

"Oh, for crying out loud!--" Colonel O'Neill begins, his hands tightening into agitated fists; I am aware that the rest of our little escort party has already melted away into safe anonymity, and if Traylar cuts and runs and leaves us high and dry, as well, I'm not sure how much damage the four of us can do in our compromised condition. But just as Daniel and Teal'c both slide up alongside the Colonel and myself to lend whatever strength and support they can to any escape attempt, the surly wardens of the gate suddenly seem to grow bored with the brief distraction our presence has provided. With several loud insults they accept the grubby wad of currency Traylar shoves into their outstretched hands and, with agonizing slowness, open the gate so that the four of us can pass through to the outside, to freedom.

"Go, go, go!" the Colonel hisses urgently, shoving both Teal'c and me out ahead of him; and as Teal'c obligingly takes my arm and moves me with commendably gentle haste to a well-worn road leading out of the city, I turn my gaze anxiously back over my shoulder to see Daniel and Colonel O'Neill hustling along right behind us.

Can it really be this easy after all? I find myself thinking in dim wonder as we get the hell out of there, pushing ourselves to the limit until we can be reasonably certain that no one is going to come charging after us in the next ten seconds. After all we suffered, after all the evil that Aliph and his guards were capable of, how could it be this easy to just walk away, to escape? It seems too good to be true, too suspect after all that's happened to us here. But as sudden exhaustion overtakes the four of us at once and we are forced to scramble off the roadway and take temporary cover in thick shrubberies off to one side of the road, the Colonel grasps my arm in an astoundingly strong grip as he slides down beside me, and his eyes burn into me like coals of fire.

"Enough," he rasps at me, somehow able to read my mind, my heart, as he glares into my eyes. "We've suffered enough; we deserve a goddamned 'Get out of jail free' ticket, Carter. And now we're going home; HOME. You got that?" As he looks at me his expression softens, his fierce glower fading into rueful exhaustion again; but he's said what he needed to say, what all of us needed to hear, and my voice trembles betrayingly as I clear my throat and murmur:

"Got it, sir."

"And that's why she's the one with all the brains, follks," the Colonel smiles at Daniel and Teal'c; and for just a moment--for one blessedly familiar, bittersweet moment, I truly believe that he's going to be okay. To believe anything else is unthinkable; to desire anything else is unimaginable. And as our commander wearily but determinedly orders us to get our asses back in gear and on the road to the 'gate, the expressions of grim resolve on both Teal'c's and Daniel's faces bolster my own stubborn vow to see to it that SG1 will come through this experience stronger than ever.

* * *

Epilogue

He's finally sleeping again, tossing and turning with fitful restiveness; so, okay, he's not exactly peaceful about it, but at least he's asleep. I think it's the first real shut-eye he's had in at least two days, despite his acerbic protestations to the contrary; and as I move quietly about Jack's living room in the wee hours of the night, I catch myself keeping an ear cocked for the first, ominous hints of fevered muttering or broken curses from his bedroom upstairs.

I don't intend to let him sink into nightmares again, not tonight; I won't let it go that far. I know what all the 'experts' have said about his subconscious trying to work things out; in the past two weeks I've listened to hours of their bullshit rhetoric and their pedantic, ultimately useless professional advice regarding Jack's post-traumatic stress diagnosis (oh, yeah, that was a tough one to pull out of the hat). I've listened and I've held my tongue, and I've watched Jack being ground into emotional powder right before my eyes at the hands of self-important idiots masquerading as healers. But now that Sam and Teal'c and I have gotten him safely away from all the headshrinkers and psych consultants and back to a place where he can feel safe, where he can actually breathe again, I'm not going to insult Jack's intelligence--or mine--by adhering to one damned thing suggested by MacKenzie or any of the others.

I know just how rough all this has been on Jack and how amazingly patient and receptive to assistance he's been under the circumstances; it really isn't like him to accept ANY type of counseling at more than face value, and the fact that he actually gave it a shot this time and TRIED to listen to all the psycho-emotional garbage that was dumped on him under the aegis of therapy and 'healing' speaks volumes about the terrifying depths of his pain and need.

But as well as all the headshrinkers might know their stuff and as easy as it is for them to sit around all day smugly talking shop to each other, none of them has the first damned clue how to help Jack. If you pureed every last brain among them together in one big blender, not a single useful idea about how to supply Jack with what he needs to get past this latest crisis would float to the top.

Not that I have any special insight myself into what his soul requires right now; I learned long ago that most of the time I can't even fathom my own, murky mind, much less help someone else figure out the intricate web of his or her psyche. But Jack is my friend, and I feel like I know him probably as well as anyone else on this world or any other; and I know that all the crap they were putting him through these past two weeks didn't do a damned thing to cleanse the soul-ravaging grief from his heart and mind. It's going to take a lot longer than that for the nightmares to stop, for the horrifying interior images of himself as Darius--methodically and coolly torturing the rest of us--to even begin to fade.

But the top brass don't want to hear that; all they can do is yammer on and on about the prohibitive cost of the Stargate program and how essential it is that such a 'valuable human resource' as Jack not be wasted. If they had their way, the Colonel would have headed right back through the gate on a new mission two DAYS after our last mission, not two weeks and counting. Time is money, folks, and the longer Jack is on down time for 'recuperative purposes,' the antsier the monkeys holding the purse strings in Washington get. Bastards, every last one of them. Even when the nightmares eventually stop, Jack's not going to be able to just shove Lah'jhan to the back of his mind like yesterday's laundry and carry on as if nothing ever happened; he's been able to pull that stunt off before, with other traumatic experiences, but not this time. Unfortunately, right now he's lying to himself that he can, and it's only making things worse for him.

"Well, they've had their turn, thrown their two cents into the mix. And now, Dr. Jackson, forget everything the psychiatrists and those yahoos from the Pentagon have been telling you these past few days; you and the rest of SG-1 know Jack better than anyone, and I trust your instincts over their mindless blather anyday. So these are MY orders--take him home and just...be there for him. Help him if you can; show him the way back to himself. And to hell with any proscribed timetable."

General Hammond's low, heartfelt words echo in my head again as I turn off the lamp in the living room, then move quietly in the darkness to the kitchen to make myself a cup of hot tea. Thank God for that man, I muse now as I rummage carefully in the cabinet for tea bags; what a relief it had been to see the silent understanding and empathy in the General's blue eyes when he'd called me into his office the morning Jack was being released from the gauntlet of his final psych review. In the privacy of his office he'd clasped my hand in his and ordered me--ordered all of SG-1, in fact--to use our own best judgment in dealing with the ongoing rigors of healing Jack and ourselves in the wake of Aliph's twisted theocracatic experiment.

"He'll have all our support, sir--we'll all help each other," I'd promised him, my fingers squeezing firmly around his hand to reinforce the strength of stubborn conviction behind my words; and as I turned to leave, George's parting words followed me into the corridor outside.

"I know you will, son; I know it."

But what good has it been, all our so-called mutual support, I think morosely now as I pour boiling water over the tea bag in my cup and slump into a chair at Jack's kitchen table. I can feel a headache coming on as I watch steam rise from the pale brown liquid before me and waft upwards, fogging the lenses of my glasses. I know it's been rough on all of us, but Jack in particular is dealing with a hell of a lot of terrible stuff right now; and I know that there's only so much any of the rest of us can do to help him. If I could erase all the hell he's been through lately, I would; at least the part with Lah'jhan. That's been the worst for him, the hardest thing for him to deal with.

But I know it's not my place to decree what should or should not be allowed to happen in the course of a person's life; maybe I'm merely displaying a lot of bombastic hubris, picking and choosing which traumatic events I'd expunge from the Jack O'Neill Record Book of Life if I had the power. But what the hell do I know about the deeper meaning or the purpose behind all the crap that happens to us as we journey through the world? I know nothing, really; so who am I to shake a fist at the heavens and demand an accounting of all that Jack has suffered?

I'm his best friend, that's who, I silently answer my own question, a surge of futile anger rising up in me as the first, troubled groans of imminent crisis sound dimly from the darkness overhead. He's MY friend, and he shouldn't have to go through this at all, dammit. But since he IS going through it--since none of us was given a choice in the matter--I can at least make sure he doesn't endure it completely alone. I can step only so far into his soul, into his space, and no further; but I want him to know that I'll always be waiting just there on the threshold, hand outstretched to grasp his own whenever he needs the connection. It's the least I can do for him, and maybe it's also the best I can do for him right now. That, and stopping yet another reappearance of Darius in Jack's dreams.

"Tell him to fuck off and die, Jack," I hear myself mutter darkly as I abandon my cooling tea and move quickly out of the kitchen and up the stairs to Jack's room. As I near the black square of doorway leading to the moaning, increasingly agitated man on the other side, I can feel my gut tighten with helpless empathy for his torment.

I've had a few Darius dreams myself since we stepped back through the gate, and having to factor in the knowledge that Aliph's implanted mental construct took root in Jack's body and used Jack's hands to carry out its 'holy will,' hasn't made it exactly easy to deal with the nightmares on a rational basis. Even while retaining the knowledge within the dreams themselves that the sentience looking out at me from Jack's eyes ISN'T Jack, I still wake up gasping and groaning with the dark horror of being tortured by the one man I trust most in the universe.

A shudder ripples through me as my own recent horror of sleep, of dreaming, tries to creep up on me again. The things Jack did to me on that godforsaken planet, the excruciating pain I felt while those brown, liquid eyes just stared down at me, unmoved...NO. Not Jack, it was NEVER Jack. Darius. And this isn't about ME right now, dammit; Jack is building up a full head of steam on tonight's nightmare locomotive to Hell, and it's time to pull the emergency cord and stop the ride before this particular train derails into territory he won't be able to navigate.

"Jack...JACK. Wake up now, open your eyes...It's me, Daniel, your friendly neighborhood archaeologist...Come on, Jack, no more dreaming."

From hard experience I've learned what to do, how to manage this; though I've crossed the threshold into his bedroom, I hold myself still just on the other side of the door sill, the muscles in my legs quivering slightly with the need to keep moving, to traverse the vast, barren space of carpeted floor separating us so I can kneel by his bed, touch him, pull him from Hell back into the world...But I've learned better. It almost took a broken jaw to heed the lesson, but it finally did sink in.

So I stay put, resisting the almost unbearable urge to shift nervously from foot to foot or to wrap my arms around my own torso in a futile attempt at comforting myself and passing that comfort along to Jack through some mystical, long-distance process of osmosis.

"JACK!" I call out again, louder and harsher this time, and the amorphous blob of writhing, muttering limbs in Jack's bed suddenly stiffens and grunts almost inquiringly, the tangled mass of covers twisted around the naked torso tightening up as though struggling to subdue their agitated captive. "Jack, time to wake up; you're home, you're safe."

"DAMMIT...Son of a bitch, cocksucking...Daniel?" Jack's voice is a rusty, agonized growl, low and desperate and inexpressibly pissed, as he sits up suddenly, so suddenly he almost chokes himself on the noose of bedsheets that's tightened around his neck during his restless tossing and turning.

"Yeah, it's me," I reply quietly, steadily, taking one cautious step forward in my bare feet while my eyes drill through the murky darkness of his room, trying to gauge his level of conscious awareness. I've been fooled before, thinking he had all his marbles back, believing he was wide awake and ready for a little reassurance...only to find myself flung violently down onto the floor or his bed, his weight pinning me, his arms and hands hurting me, his mind still captured by the nightmares, by the terror of being someone else, someone so very bad...

"Daniel..."

I stay still, watching as Jack angrily untangles himself from the covers and swings his legs over the side of the bed, slumping in his boxers on the edge of the mattress; his hands clench into fists that dig relentlessly into the sides of his head, and I can only stand there with my heart hammering sickly in my chest, my throat closing up with the unspeakable pain of seeing him like this, of feeling the confused anguish emanating from him like dark poison in the confines of the room. The odor of sweat and fear and of something even more bitter--something that reeks of shame and self-loathing--permeates the air, and I bite down hard on my lip to keep from moaning my own grief out loud when Jack asks me in a small, lost voice:

"Daniel, am I...me?"

"You are Colonel Jack O'Neill, leader of SG-1...you are my commander and my friend, and right now you are awake, at home and in your own bed...at, ah...3:56 am, give or take a few seconds."

I've been moving as I speak, keeping my voice calm and confident, taking slow, deliberate steps toward him across the dark abyss of his bedroom floor; in the faint light coming in his windows from outside, I can see the deranged spikes of silver hair sticking up on his scalp, as well as the faint sheen of perspiration slicking the skin of his naked back and shoulders. He is trembling slightly and continuously, I can see that too as I draw nearer; and as a strangled groan of mixed relief and mortification escapes his lips, I veer off course and head not for his side but to the master bath adjoining his bedroom.

Not bothering to turn on the light, I fumble quickly along the wall till my hands contact the cold metal bar of the towel rack I know is there; impatiently snagging the towel draped over the bar, I pull it off the rack and head back to Jack's bed, still moving with measured steps to keep from startling his already over-stressed senses. Wordlessly I kneel on the floor beside his left knee, my descent slow and steady; even though I'm careful not to touch him, I can feel the tremors of his leg muscles as he breathes deeply, roughly, his head bowed in strung-out silence.

One breath, two, then three...I wait, my mouth dry, my own hands threatening to shake and clutch too tightly at the terrycloth material wadded between my fingers; I listen to Jack's respirations, absorb the subtle ripples of fading terror still shivering along his nerve endings, goose-pimpling his skin. I can judge it with a fair degree of accuracy now, this gradual return from fathomless horror to reason and sanity; and when the muted gleam of Jack's eyes begins to lift reluctantly to mine, I feel the rueful half-smile that tugs at my lips as I offer up the towel.

"May I?" I murmur, and he swivels his head to look at me directly, the hollowed-out shadows of his face appearing shockingly gaunt and wasted in the dimness. He doesn't answer me in words, but the almost nonexistent bob of his head grants me permission to lift the towel and pat carefully at his sweat-slicked arms, my touch delicate and as non-intrusive as possible as I slowly transfer my ministrations to his neck and shoulders.

By glacially slow degrees he relaxes and slumps even lower on the side of the bed, his chest bowing in until his upper body becomes curved and lax and achingly vulnerable beneath my touch. As a heavy sigh escapes him, I rub the sweat from his back with the towel, gliding the textured material up and down the ridge of his spine and along the cooling flesh on either side of his backbone. When I'm done I drape the towel around the nape of his neck, reacting to some unspoken signal coming from his mute form; with another sigh he reaches up a pensive hand to finger the sweat-dampened cloth resting against his skin and then snorts drily, his voice still shaky but steadily regaining composure:

"Am I me...God, what a stupid question."

"Am I me...to be or not to be...same basic conundrum," I return lightly, and something warm and deep and unbelievably poignant breaks open inside my soul as Jack lifts one sardonic, mildly aggravated brow in my direction and then gives in and allows the barest facsimile of a smile to flirt with the corners of his mouth.

"Smart-ass geek," he mutters without heat, and after a momentary hesitation he lifts one exhausted hand to my shoulder and gives it an awkward, slightly embarrassed pat. "Is it really 4 am?"

"You've set a new record," I reply with a grave smile, and he snorts again, his fingers digging very lightly and oh-so-briefly into the flesh of my shoulder before giving me a light push away from him.

"Whoo hoo; three whole hours of uninterrupted zzz's this time before the boogie man came to visit," he drawls sarcastically and pushes himself to his feet, his lean figure seeming uncharacteristically pale and fragile in the darkness. "I am him and he is me and I gotta tell you, I am really getting FED UP with this shit. With HIS shit...which becomes MY shit, which is all very creepy and confusing and gives me a headache. Hey, Daniel, you had breakfast yet?" he finishes apropos of nothing, and I shrug as I rise slowly to my feet and stand facing him.

'It's 4 am, Jack; when would I have had the time OR inclination to procure breakfast?" I retort steadily. And at the everyday, normal lilt of exasperation he hears in my voice, the gaping void of dark despair that has lain like a shroud over my friend's taut features since he first awoke draws back into itself and thankfully retreats for another night.

"Well, I could eat," he muses consideringly, hands lifting absently to rub the used towel back and forth across the nape of his neck. "We could probably rustle up some scrambled eggs and bacon, a few slices of toast, some marmalade...That tofu and mushroom crap Carter brought over for dinner last night and had the nerve to call edible did NOT make me OR my stomach happy."

"Yes, I got the distinct impression that you didn't enjoy it very much," I reply, and I can feel a smile tugging at my lips as I relive Jack poking at the stuff on his plate with his fork held in a highly defensive and suspicious position, almost as if he expected Sam's main course to leap off the table and go for his throat.

"As if I needed to be even further traumatized," he sighs now; and even though we both smile at each other at the wry witticism, a pained awareness of just how NOT normal and okay all this still is lingers in the space between us. Not so hard, Jack, I want to tell him; don't try so damned hard. It's all right to NOT be all right, to still wake up shaking and scared shitless at this point because for a heart-stopping moment you can't remember if you're really YOU again or if you're still Darius, can't know for sure if you were EVER really you, or if the dream is actually reality and this whole, deceptively peaceful scene right now is the real nightmare, the real horrorfest for having wanted this interval of calm so badly, for having NEEDED a friend to reach out to, to hold onto when up becomes down and nothing makes sense...

Jack reads all that in my eyes now, his narrowed gaze piercing through the subtle darkness to suck the truth from my soul; his jaw tightens briefly in anger at what he sees revealed, and his fingers clutch spastically at the towel around his neck as accusation flares in his eyes. Don't offer me your pop psychology, his silent glare warns me; don't make me stand here in my godamned underwear at 4 am and look at you and admit that there are demons living in my head, demons and ghosts and the spirits of lost little boys who whisper to me in dreams that I am the lost one, not them, whispering to me to let them go, to remember who and what I am and to BELIEVE in myself and in the existence of good... and to believe in YOU, Daniel, in our friendship...

"I'm going to grab a shower," Jack says now, severing the breathless, darkly powerful jolt of connection between us with such abruptness that I feel a sudden, sharp pain in my chest at its rough sundering.

"Do you think you could gather up enough stuff in the meantime to make omelettes?" he adds with studied diffidence. "And maybe pancakes, too. But no damned coffee for you; you know Teal'c will show up for HIS Colonel-sitting stint in about three hours, and if you have coffee you'll NEVER go to sleep once you get back home."

"Omelettes, pancakes, NO coffee--I think I can handle it," I reply with the barest of sighs, stepping back regretfully as the walls come up again between us, trapping my friend once more behind his lonely barrier of guilt and rage and denial.

Part of me wants to scream in frustration, but I know that would do no good; better to tell myself that we both just took a mutual step in the right direction, however small and tentative the scuff of our feet on the convoluted trail. He's going to be okay; in his own time, on his own terms, he WILL deal with this in the best way for himself and for his soul's gradual healing.

It's inconceivable to those of us who care about him so deeply that he could ever be lost beyond redemption, that he would ever give up the core of his soul without a brutal fight to the ends of eternity and beyond to snatch it back, battered and roughened but no less beautiful, no less perfect in its natural expression of who and what he is and will always be. This is Jack; he is both my friend and my nemesis, my detractor and supporter, the thorn in my side and the strong hand of support at my back; he is weathered and taciturn and soft-hearted and fiercely loyal. And he is one of the best damned human beings I have ever known.

"The kitchen? Food, Daniel? Eggs, cheese, butter, omelette pan, spatula...any of this ringing any bells for you?" Jack's voice murmurs past me in the quiet waning of night, his touch on my arm featherlight and somehow all too brief as he glides by me to reach the bathroom doorway. "And there are oranges in a bag in there somewhere, if you can find them I'll make fresh squeezed when I get out of the shower..."

As he closes the door behind him, muttering grumpily to himself about the obtuseness of insomniac archaeologists who couldn't unearth a toaster from the pantry if their lives depended on it, I stand for one long moment more, absorbing the blessedly normal sounds of Jack turning the shower on and slamming drawers as he searches out the things he'll need for his morning ablutions. I can feel his energy all around me, flowing through me in some indefinable but no less vivid caress; in the fading warmth of his touch on my arm I sense the essence of that part of his soul that no evil can ever touch, and the raw power of it stuns me.

A feeling of indescribable lightness sweeps through me in a dizzying wave, and as I gasp and turn toward the bedroom door and the upstairs hallway beyond, I tell myself that it's just nerves and exhaustion washing over me. But deep inside I know better; deep inside, rising light and clear and free, is a spirit of absolute certainty, adorned with the simple truth of hope and friendship and the inviolable sanctity of the human soul.

"Morning is coming, Jack; it's just over the horizon," I murmur to the closed bathroom door; and as I move quietly downstairs to contemplate oranges and butter and eggs, my heart searches out the dawn and feels it breaking, new and whole and filled with breathless promise.

~THE END~


End file.
